Dungeonlands Kickstarter and Heroes & Servitors

The 24 Hour Design Party is complete, and the Dungeonlands Kickstarter is live!

Here is release info on the Kickstarter:

DUNGEONLANDS: TOMB OF THE LICH QUEEN

Savage Mojo's Old School Killer Dungeon which will be released in both Savage Worlds and Pathfinder versions.

Savage Mojo is pleased to announce DUNGEONLANDS, our upcoming killer dungeon set in the First Age of Relic, our fantasy realm, where your heroes will answer a call through time and space to rescue an angel imprisoned by the Lich-Queen.

Her Tomb is littered with the bones of all the heroes that came before. Her Machine spews forth endless hordes of chaos. Her Palace will hold your finest hour...or your crushing defeat.

The first Savage Mojo product produced for both Pathfinder and Savage Worlds, DUNGEONLANDS combines the epic adventure you've come to love from Savage Suzerain with classic, old school dungeons that have shaped the foundations of fantasy gaming.

There's an award-winning development team behind our Dungeonlands line, including writers John Wick (Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, Houses of the Blooded http://johnwickpresents.com/) and Lee Szczepanik, Jr (War of the Dead http://www.daringentertain.com/); artists Jason Engle (http://jaestudio.com/), Jim Pavelec (http://jimpavelec.com/), Aaron Acevedo (http://aaronace.com/), Alida Saxon (http://alidasaxon.com/); and Savage Mojo (http://savagemojo.com/), ENnie and Origins Award winning publishers of Suzerain roleplaying games, Gamescapes roleplaying game accessories, and Brainradio fiction.

We're raising funds to create two books (one for Pathfinder rules and another for Savage Worlds) and a wide variety of accessories too: character cards, monster cards, a full soundtrack, tile maps for the entire dungeon, and more! We have a lot of great pledge rewards, including commissions from Jason Engle, custom tile map sets personalized for your game, or even illustrated fiction based on your character! Look for more on these and other rewards in the coming updates.

Funding Goal: $5,000
Deadline: October 14th.

HEROES & SERVITORS

They came from all corners of the universe,
heroes to defeat the Lich Queen
and free an angel from the Dungeonlands.

They came from all corners of the universe,
servitors of vile alien gods to protect the Lich Queen
and keep an angel imprisoned in the Dungeonlands.

High Fantasy; Epic Conflict

Heroes & Servitors is a book of pre-generated characters, ready to play
with backstories written. Get straight into the action. And for GMs,
there’s an evil, twisted version of each character, together with a premade
fiendish dungeon encounter especially for them. However you
mix them up, they’re bound to enliven your killer dungeon experience.

This is a product for the Savage Worlds rules system and Savage Suzerain. A Pathfinder version is in development.
A copy of Dungeonlands: Tomb of the Lich Queen is recommended to
make the most of this book.

Heroes & Servitors was created by the Savage Mojo crew over a 24 period as the end result of the Savage Mojo 24 Hour Design Party.

Savage Mojo presents DUNGEONLANDS

Savage Mojo is pleased to announce DUNGEONLANDS, our upcoming killer dungeon set in the First Age of Relic, our fantasy realm, where your heroes will answer a call through time and space to rescue an angel imprisoned by the Lich-Queen.

Her Tomb is littered with the bones of all the heroes that came before. Her Machine spews forth endless hordes of chaos. Her Palace will hold your finest hour...or your crushing defeat.

The first Savage Mojo release produced for both Pathfinder and Savage Worlds, DUNGEONLANDS combines the epic adventure you've come to love from Savage Suzerain with classic, old school dungeons that have shaped the foundations of fantasy gaming.

• Savage Mojo will host a 24 hour online Design Party beginning at 9pm Eastern Time on Friday, September 14^th and running to 9pm Eastern Time on Saturday the 15^th. Utilizing a combination of livestream, online chats, whiteboards, blog posts and social media, the Savage Mojo Design Team will publicly create a new supplement for DUNGEONLANDS live and on the internet!
• DUNGEONLANDS will be the focus of the very first Savage Mojo Kickstarter, as we move to bring this ambitious project to print. Being far more than a single book, DUNGEONLANDS is our most ambitious product to date, with map tiles by Alida Saxon, random dungeon tiles and card decks for random exploration encounters!
• During the 24 Hour Design Party, Savage Mojo will be holding open auditions for the role of our Pathfinder rules guru! Love Pathfinder? Want to be a part of the most ambitious Savage Mojo project to date? Show us what you’ve got during the 24 Hour Design Party! Check out our Facebook, Twitter (@SavageMojo) and Google+ for more information!
• Each version (Pathfinder and Savage Worlds) will be designed to give you the best old school killer dungeon experience for each system!

Tommy's Take on Capes, Cowls & Villains Foul

I've reviewed a couple of Spectrum Games’ releases in the past, so I thought I’d take a look at their first foray into supers gaming with Capes, Cowls & Villains Foul.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: Spectrum Games takes genre emulation very seriously, with Slasher Flick being the prime example, although Cartoon Action Hour Season 2 is nothing to sneeze at. At the time of this writing, the PDF is $13.99 for 163 pages in full color, or in softcover Print on Demand for $31.99. Disappointingly, there are no bookmarks or clickable links, two things I’ve come to love about PDFs.

The guts of Cartoon Action Hour live on inside CC&VF, with the game using all d12s, player-defined Traits, Factoids and so on. Damage is handled with Setback Tokens, not unlike Stress in other slightly-less-traditional RPGs, except all types of Setbacks are calculated together…there is no tracking of Physical Stress, Mental Stress, etc.

Character creation is point based, with three scales given: 100 pts (for Street Level or rookie characters), 150 (default) and 200 (The Big Guns). Traits, as noted, are player-defined, and you are assumed to wind up with 5-12 of them. Traits are rated as Human (1-4), Superhuman (5-8) and Cosmic (9+). Human Traits might be stuff like DETECTIVE. Superhuman might be TIME-SHIFTING while Cosmic might be GOD OF WAR. Traits wear down as you use them in a scene, and you can further define them with Bonuses and Restrictions. Some examples include Auto-Defend (one free use per Issue for defense), Hint (very GM-heavy Bonus, allowing for “hunches” or psychic flashes), Linked (allowing you to use multiple Traits to boost a roll), or Situational (where Traits get better in specific situations). Restrictions include Editorial Choice (where you must spend Editorial Control to use it), Not-A-Finisher (cannot end a fight), Definitive (it always works in a certain way, and there is an associated drawback to that), and Shared Trait (like a headquarters or AVENGERS ASSEMBLE! or something). A cheat sheet of modifiers is provided, as is a series of example traits and how they are built (like making duplicates of yourself, mind control or even sidekicks). There’s also a big list of example traits of various types like Professional Traits (Detective, Investigative Reporter), Genre Traits (Breaks the Fourth Wall, Revealing Costume), Equipment Traits and so on. Examples are ALWAYS good in player-defined Trait systems and they don’t skimp here.

PCs have Editorial Control, which are essentially plot points. You can spend them to re-roll dice, avoid knockouts, save innocents or pull off random twists…and if you want REALLY random twists, there’s a chart you can roll on giving you effects like interrupting combat (giving you a free action and then restarting initiative), Great Shot (giving you an attack modifier), Sacrifice (giving you a bonus to a Trait roll to help someone else), a surprise cameo and more.

Complications give you points of Editorial Control when activated, while Factoids just further round out your character (like your shrinking, leaping, super-strong robot EATS LOTS OF POTATO CHIPS, for instance).

A character creation example is included, as well as Plug and Play Templates for various power levels, and a slew of heroes and villains (like Americana, Boy Frog and Death Stalker or Dead Eye, Death Star and The Rat King).

The basic mechanic is simple: Roll a d12, add a Trait, beat a target number. If you have Linked Traits, your bonus is higher. If you have Benefit dice, you roll multiple d12s and take the best result. If you have Detriment dice, you roll multiple d12s and take the lowest result. If you roll a 1, that’s a fumble. If you roll a 12, double the value of the Primary Trait before adding the die and modifiers. If you fail a roll by more than your Threshold (based off of your starting Editorial Control), then you take a Big Hit and are knocked out.

Initiative is free-flowing. Essentially, when combat begins the Editor (GM) decides who goes first. After they act, they pick who goes next and so on and so on, but everybody has to get a turn before anybody else gets a turn. Advice is given for adjudicating the rules in situations (like when a player insists on using a Trait that may not be appropriate for an action), as well as gang piling, combos, or Pushing (taking Setback token to roll more dice…that stick with the result, rather than just having you pick the higher one).

Villains get their own chapter, and scale depending on whether they are working solo or in a team. Think about how Spidey can be pushed to the limit by each member of the Sinister Six individually, but still not be overwhelmed by them attacking him at once. Villains also get to spend Editorial Control on things like Escapes, Big Speeches (which will either demoralize the heroes or give away crucial plans), setting off big explosions or even pulling the “It was really a Doombot all along!” bit. There’s even a section on shorthanding the random villains that get used to fill out the Masters of Evil or the Taskmaster’s lackeys in a pinch.

Optional Rules include Zero Level Traits (letting you make a straight die roll without modifiers for something that everyone would have on some level), a suggestion on cheating the die rolls for NPCs (starting off by roll 2d12 and taking the highest, and shifting to taking the lowest near the climax of the adventure), shifting Auto-Defend to once per scene (instead of issue), mixing and matching heroes of different point totals (this equals more Editorial Control for the lower total characters), and playing “Heroes in Training” games where you build the “end result” heroes and shave points off to get the “rookie” version. There’s also rules for Killing Damage, LARPing and Experience Points/Upgrades/Overhauling characters.

An extensive example of play is provided (complete with PCs of differing point totals in order to show those rules off).

The Issues chapter offers some general GMing advice, as well as a pair of pretty-well-ready-to-run Issues featuring villains from earlier in the book.

The book ends with a character sheet, glossary, summary charts and index.

WHAT WORKS: Tons of examples. Simple system, with the Setback Tokens being among my favorite “non-Hit Point” damage systems I’ve seen (with the word Stress just stressing me out). CC&VF seems to have taken a lot of ideas from other games but implemented them well. Oh, and I loved the random twists. The system is very flexible without being completely hand-wavey.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK: Very few of the example characters terribly inspired me. Many of the optional rules (like the templates or building heroes in advance and working up to them) don’t do a thing for me…but they are optional. There are big chunks of the system that are open to player-GM negotiation, which can go bad in the wrong hands.

CONCLUSION: While many of the support pieces did little to inspire me, the core seems very flexible and very sound. With large parts of the system open to such interpretation, certain types of players can make for nightmarish sessions, just like certain kinds of GMs can, but that’s true of any system (and especially Supers systems, which require a certain amount of buy-in from all parties above and beyond most genres). Unlike some other recent entrants into the supers RPG realm, I feel confident that I have a good/decent grasp of the mechanics right away, but I suppose I would have actually preferred the “serial numbers filed off” approach to the sample characters, rather than the characters used, because generic versions of Thor, Flash, Batman, Silver Surfer, Captain America, Wolverine and Superman are more useful for me in pinning down the important bits of the system. Does CC&VF hit some magic area that no other supers game ever has? Not for me, not really. “Hawkeye fighting alongside Thor” has been built into more and more games over the years, with BASH and ICONS even handling it in largely the same way. Does that make CC&VF a bad game? Heck no. If anything, I'd call it the more "traditional" alternative to Marvel Heroic. I intend to play around with the character creation to see how well it models certain characters of mine, but I’d be inclined to put it near the top of my Supers options right now, if not at the very top.

tremulus and Truth and Lies

To follow up on the Exploding Aces Kickstarter I blogged about the other day, I have two more to mention:

WU XING: TRUTH & LIES

Obviously, I'm a big fan of Wu Xing. I've mentioned this a lot. I feel bad that I didn't mention this Kickstarter before, because, Wu Xing.

Anywho, this book covers the Will of Iron and Hidden Strands of Fate clans, two major Wu Xing clans (the former acting as a force for justice while the latter manipulates everything they can from behind the scenes). I have yet to be disappointed with a Wu Xing purchase (or any purchase from Third Eye Games, and I own everything except Mermaid Adventures...I even own t-shirts for each game line), and I have backed this at the $25 level in order to score a print and PDF copy.

It only has 13 hours to go and they are trying to score $400 more, at which point a Wu Xing combat tracker app will be released to backers for free, as well as a new clan.

tremulus

I left this uncapitalized because the word is supposed to be uncapitalized, and I didn't want a lower case "i" and a capitalized rest of the word.

Anyway, this Kickstarter is for a storytelling game by Reality Blurs, based off of the Apocalypse World engine with a Lovecraftian twist. I'm torn between the PDF and print levels, but the anticipation is killing me enough that I've acquired Monsterhearts (which uses the same engine) for review.

Read a playtest right here on the blog.

With 24 days left to go, it has been funded many times over and just keeps unlocking stretch goal after stretch goal.

Tommy's Take on Exploding Aces

Another one of those “perks of blogging”, I get an early look at the Exploding Aces RPG by 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming, who primarily make d20 based stuff, and so are usually out of my normal areas of interest. Coincidentally (or not), they have a Kickstarter going on right now for Exploding Aces.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: 18 days to go as of this writing, Exploding Aces has reached its initial funding goal of $3,000 and is working towards a $5,000 stretch goal for player mats. Higher end stretch goals include custom card decks and GM screens. $10 gets you the PDF version and $25 gets you the print, while $50 gets you the full color version. To see the various pledge levels and rewards, click on the Kickstarter link above. This review is based off of a pre-layout version of the manuscript.

Exploding Aces eschews dice altogether, in favor of a traditional deck of playing cards, complete with two jokers. Exploding Aces are references to automatic successes, which occur when you draw an Ace. What kind of Ace is an exploding one is dependent on how skilled you are at what you’re trying to do, but an Ace of Spades is always Exploding. In fact, if you get an Ace of Spades as the first card draw, it’s a Sterling Success, which makes it an automatic success and can regain spent Force of Will points or gain you twists (which are kinda like Savage Worlds bennies). Force of Will points are used to flip cards and then decide if you want to keep them or discard them.

As noted, Aces Explode, which equals success, while Jokers equal failure (and possibly botches). You draw a number of cards equal to your relevant Quality, and the difficulty chart determines which cards are Plus, which are Minus and which are Blank. You want to have more Plus cards than Minus cards in order to succeed.

The damage system is interesting, as you draw cards for the weapon type, with 2-10 dealing damage, and the suit determining how much (half rounded down, half rounded up or full damage). You can soak wounds, but health is tracked on Health boxes, and you can choose to accept Setbacks instead of actually marking off damage boxes. These include injuries like Cracked Ribs, Acoustic Trauma and Hairline Fractures, as well as issues like Hysteria, Doubt and even being Cursed.

Character generation starts with selecting four dominant aspects: Extrovert or Introvert, Realist or Dreamer, Thinker or Sensitive and Judge or Adapter. Then you spend 10 points on Mind, Body and Psyche, determined by your personality type as determined by your choices above.  The qualities break down into further categories, with Body defined by Agility, Appearance, Stamina and Strength, Mind by Intellect, Perception and Wits and Psyche by Poise and Spirit.

Next, you pick your Persona, and this does give you a seven point spread divided among Combat, Physical, Knowledge and Social. These are spent on Edges for each group, like Fight, Firearms, Drive, Sneak, Medicine, Survival, Guile and Persuasion.

After this, you get 25 free points to further customize your character, including buying ratings up to Trained, Skilled and Expert, as well as Lifestyle.

Basically everything is given benchmarks to go off of to guide your character creation selections, with a generalized scale of 0 to 6 and more specific examples for each aspect.

If you buy up to the Supernatural level (6), you get a free talent. These include things like Martial Combat Master (Agility), Owning the Room (Appearance), Tough (Stamina), Python Grasp (Strength), Lightning Calculator (Intellect), Dark Vision (Perception), Empath (Wits), Master Assassin (Poise), and Beacon of Hope (Spirit).

Additionally, you can further define your characters with Talents and like Hammer Fan (for revolvers), Danger Sense, Crack Driver, Area Knowledge, Surgeon, Carouser, Famous, Honorable, Mentor and Optimist. Flaws include Coward, Red-Shirt (you are ALWAYS attacked first), Allergies, Deaf, Klutz, Code of the West, Notorious, Wanted, Dark Secret, Addiction and Nightmares.

The GM’s section is a broad cross section of advice that’ll have templates for minions, nemeses and creatures, as well as rules governing things like explosives, fighting mobs, etc.

WHAT WORKS: Interesting core mechanic, and pretty easily expandable from the vast amount of talents and flaws already provided in the rules. The extensive list of sample actions should help most GMs figure out not only what should be used for each action, but how to make actions feel different (like the ascending difficulty when climbing a mountain).

WHAT DOESN’T WORK: As with most “universal” systems, it seems to need a guiding hand to get you from the options and into your setting. That guiding hand seems to be missing, at least from this draft document, though the Kickstarter page says several adventures will be included, so this may prove to be a moot point. Some of the Setbacks were so…clinical and specific…that it was almost jarring for what seems to be well suited for an action-adventure kind of game. Not a huge fan of the organization, especially with things like an in-depth discussion of damage and setbacks showing up before character creation and way before combat.

CONCLUSION: Are the mechanics gimmicky? Well, yes. Is that a bad thing? I can’t answer that for you. For me, I think System Matters because I like the Game part as much as I do the Role-Playing, so I’m cool with a system where everyone’s drawing cards instead of rolling dice. I like the concept, even if I don’t particularly NEED another universal system (which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t play or run another one…I don’t need a lot of things that I later buy)…I’ll just be particularly interested to see the adventures, which will really show just how adaptable the game is between genres. The project is already funded, and 4 Winds have a strong reputation, so this is a pretty risk-free Kickstarter, in my view.

Tommy's Take on Civil War: Fifty State Initiative

Not Pictured: Baron f'n Zemo

Margaret Weis Productions has continued their support for the Marvel Heroic RPG line with the supplemental Civil War Event Book called Civil War: Fifty State Initiative, based on the fallout of the Civil War and Reed Richards’ plan to place a hero team in every state.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: The print version, not available as of this writing, seems to be about $20, but the PDF is $12.99 at RPGNow. The book is 136 pages and divided up into four sections: The Initiative, The Thunderbolts, Heroes for Hire and Hero Datafiles. This isn’t a huge book by any stretch, and on the surface seems kinda limited, but it has some cool bits.

The Initiative chapter begins with a focus on Camp Hammond, the superhero training camp from Avengers: The Initiative, and includes an example training scenario, as well as a short post-Civil War attack by Hydra, with an example of statted out Hydra vessel, kinda like their Helicarrier, as scary as that sounds. Not surprisingly, the book gives you a few options for dealing with the fallout of the adventure, including being drafted into Henry Peter Gyrich’s Shadow Initiative.

The rest of the chapter is largely datafiles for teams like The Shadow Initiative, The Great Lakes Champions, The Liberteens and The Rangers. This gives the book the interesting distinction of providing the second Constrictor write-up before we’ve ever had an official Magneto write-up. Most of the characters are completely usable as PCs as long as you add your own Milestones. There are also a few notable omissions, like Beta Ray Bill from Omega Flight.

The next section – The Thunderbolts - makes me REALLY giddy, for a few reasons. First off, Thunderbolts-specific Unlockables, like unlocking captured characters as playable characters, Pro-Reg Heroes being able to call in T-Bolts members for assistance, or T-Bolts members earning looser security for themselves. Milestones include trying to escape the T-Bolts, trying to go straight or trying to destroy the T-Bolts from within. The next thing that made me giddy? Baron f’n Zemo, complete with a “Born Better” powerset. I love Zemo…a LOT. Two action scenes are also included, one featuring the T-Bolts taking down rogue, D-list heroes and the other featuring the T-Bolts trying to recruit villains. There’s a sidebar about using the T-Bolts to expand Civil War, with special mention of one of my favorite subplots, when Zemo tried to win Captain America’s trust (the basis for my Mythic SAGA game I played a while back).

The Heroes For Hire chapter gives a small treatment to playing mercenaries, complete with Unlockables and Milestones. One of the nastiest is an 10xp Unlockable that allows you to have retroactively hired one of the opponent’s in the scene…turning them into a double agent who is actually on your side. A pair of action scenes are also included.

In addition to all of the Watcher datafiles that have been included, about 37 full blown player datafiles are included as well. Some of them include Black Cat, Bullseye, Venom, Songbird, Moonstone, Radioactive Man, Howard the Duck, Justice, Penance, Paladin and Nextwave.

WHAT WORKS: Baron f’n Zemo. Mechanical support for a Thunderbolts game. More datafiles are always a good thing.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK: The art is pretty pixilated, especially the cover. I assume this is to keep the file size down. Some notable omissions among the datafiles, like Beta Ray Bill and Norman Osborn (who became the leader of the T-Bolts during the time of the Fifty State Initiative), or Initiative Members like Slapstick and Ultragirl. No Milestones or Unlockables for a “Heroes in Training/Camp Hammond” campaign.

CONCLUSION. I wanna run, or play, a Thunderbolts campaign, or anything as Zemo. Holy crap. The rest is good, too. But yeah, Zemo FTW. I have a feeling we’ll get a few Unlockables or Milestones in the X-Men book that’ll adapt to a “heroes in training” thing, but I could be wrong. I like it. Not as much as the Civil War book, and there are definitely areas where the book could have been beefed up, or perhaps done better with more focus (like some of the aforementioned Milestones and Unlockables), but still a great product, even if it’s not up to the standards of the first two releases.

Tommy's Take on The Deadly Seven

I saw The Deadly Seven mentioned over on the Pinnacle boards a few weeks ago and decided to check it out. I like to think I stay up on Savage Worlds stuff, but this seemed to slip under the radar for me.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: The Deadly Seven is a “Poly-System Game”, designed by paNik for Savage Worlds, True 20 and d20 Modern, though I am only reviewing the Savage Worlds material here. For $12.95, you get a 150 page adventure, a bunch of maps, and two sets of Clue Cards to be used as player handouts. The PDFs are heavily layered, allowing you to change the rules you are viewing with the press of a button, or remove the backgrounds for printing. The Deadly Seven is designed to be dropped into any modern campaign and has both paranormal and adult elements.

The Deadly Seven intends the Guts skill to be used, unless you’re dropping it into a setting that doesn’t use Guts, of course. The book provides seven threats…four overt threats and three subtle threats. The threats are intended to interweave around each other, rather than being a straight up run through of the seven threats. A suggested run through of the plot is provided, with the caveat that if it takes a different course, so be it.

The seven threats are all mutually tied to a single plot element, complete with a flowchart showing how the elements of the threats tie in together.

The first threat (lust) is a great example of how to run a heavy investigative adventure for Savage Worlds, with lots of clues and red herrings to follow up on. The PCs are left investigating a missing family man, whose fate is connected to a series of brutal rapes. The resolution of the investigation is pretty open-ended, leaving the PCs directly responsible for how the NPCs recover, depending on their actions.

The second threat (envy), in investigation into an illness striking a medical research company, is similarly thematic, though it has a much more abrupt resolution and is actually much likelier to end badly for the PCs (and can be even harder to resolve, perhaps not even being truly resolved until sometime well past the end of the investigation). That said, the resolution can have a HUGE impact on the ultimate resolution of the whole thing.

Threat three (gluttony) can be handled as an investigation or a full on fight scene, depending on your preference. It is an even more horrific twist than the previous threats, involving a voracious flesh-eater.

Threat four (wrath) is incredibly open-ended. It’s a hostage situation, with the police’s actions laid out, as well as the layout of the location, for the PCs to figure out how to get in, stop the hostage situation, and get out.

Threat five (greed) is the first of the subtle threats, involving a conservative talk show host/preacher with a secret. As someone with right-leaning politics, this could have gotten really insulting, but the preacher is portrayed as a very realistic, but flawed person. A very surprising piece. The three subtle threats have a way of spreading out over the course of the module, with the villain of this threat working a long term plan to destroy the PCs.

Threat six (sloth) is one of the most unassuming. The most subtle of the threats, the target of this one can wind up working at cross purposes with the PCs, undermining them before they realize what’s going on.

Threat seven (pride), is set up as the Big Bad in the provided plot outline, and like the other two subtle threats, can easily make his presence felt throughout the module. Like many of the others, this can have a happy ending or a downer ending, depending on what the PCs do.

Seven more threats are provided, one for each sin, to be expanded out by the GM if he chooses.

The common link to the threats is a doctor and his experimental machine, which will have to be dealt with. Again, the PCs can be the deciding factor here, trying to use this infernal device for good, or destroying it to ensure it never causes harm like this again. See, this device allows demons (representing each sin) to possess people. The module provides a helpful section on just what you can do with the possessed, as well as the ramifications of things like wounding the host bodies.

Stat-free descriptions of the major characters in the module are provided (the stats for each system are in separate files), with picture, description and the roles they serve in the module. This concludes with an examination of the seven deadly sins.

The possessed play a huge role in the adventure, and the last part of the book is a primer on demonic possession, delving into the signs of possession, the types of possession and so on. This is an interesting read, and useful reference for a game, including four views on possession and how each view reacts to certain theories (like whether or not the faithful are immune to possession). A section on Exorcisms is provided, complete with variations by religion. For extra effect, there’s even a list of conditions that can be confused with possession, like Epilepsy. The Exorcism guide concludes with a list of historical possessions and hauntings.

The zip file also includes a number of maps, printable clue cards to hand out to the players and a packet of character stats for the adversaries, the demons possessing them and even a couple of generic stat blocks that have a bearing on the module.

WHAT WORKS: A very multilayered module that isn’t a railroad. Some great examples of how to do different types of adventures in Savage Worlds, such as an investigation. The Possession sourcebook is comprehensive as well. The NPCs are all generally well written…surprisingly so, in some cases. The PCs not only decide how successful each mission is, but even the end result in most cases.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK: The organization can be a bit dodgy at first, especially when you realize that the various threats can easily run over the tops of each other (and probably will). The adult content is pretty hard to remove, and will limit the audience because of it. If you run just the threats with no interruption, the common links of each case could get repetitive.

CONCLUSION: A very nice product with lots of variety, great handouts and examples about how to tackle different scenarios in Savage Worlds. In addition, the product takes advantage of the digital medium with layers utilized to switch between rules sets in the adventure, helpful “How Tos” for the Clue Cards and making the pages printer friendly. Deadly Seven is a great example of a scenario that has no assumed outcome, positive or negative, for the encounters, leaving all of that entirely in the hands of the PCs. Well worth checking out if you don’t mind some sex, drugs and violence in your games.

375 posts! A Look Back...

This is my 375th post on the blog, a little over 2 and a half years from when I launched it as an excuse to keep me writing on a regular basis.

How'd that work out?

Well...I haven't always been able to blog as much as I like, because I went from unemployed college student to warehouse worker/comic book writer/social media manager/freelance editor, those latter two gigs stemming entirely from this blog and my reviews (which came to dominate the blog).

This is actually the second "Most Unread Blog on the Internet. Ever.", the first one being much more personal and political, being referred to by the The UK Mirror as "A Liberal Read", where my tagline came from. My logo is about 14 months old, designed for me by my friend and colleague (every Savage Worlds product I've been credited on, so has he), Aaron Acevedo.

As of this writing, my blog's had 184,947 hits (which isn't 100% accurate, I'm sure, but it's probably close), and despite being increasingly busy, it's managed to top the previous year's traffic month to month. In fact, every month this year except June has doubled the One Year Ago stats. I attribute this to "Evergreen" posts like Savage Worlds Characters Are All The Same, which prop up traffic even when I'm not posting often.

To my annoyance, my most read post on the blog is my take on The Walking Dead season one, due in no small part to the Emma Bell pic inserted in the article.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ICONS posts draw more traffic than any of my other RPG posts, though I'm convinced that's more to do with TMNT than it is ICONS.

The most read RPG review I've written is, interestingly, Leverage.

My audience is primarily American, with Canada pulling in a distant second. To my surprise, Poland makes up the third largest segment of my audience (with Canada only supplying about 500 more hits than Poland does). The UK provides a sizable fourth, and then it's a pretty big drop off in readership.

My highest traffic month was this past January, which isn't a surprise as my Top 6 giveaway got plastered around the internet, with Pinnacle posting a front page update about it, among other things.

Speaking of...I'm moving the  Top 6 cutoff date to November 30th this year, so I have an extra couple of weeks to contact the publishers of the selected products before everyone disappears before Christmas.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I hope to continue posting much, much more. I aim to continue my Half Dozen Heroes articles, I'll probably post more about D&DNext, I have another slew of RPG products lined up to review and I'm working on scanning my adventure notes for one of my Necessary Evil adventures through an OCR program to post up for your consumption.

Thanks for reading, and keep the dice dizzy!

Tommy

D&D Next Early Thoughts

I'm not sure exactly what I'm allowed to say, so I'm erring on the side of caution here, because I don't want to disrespect the playtest agreement with Wizards, but I've been tinkering with the D&D Next playtest rules recently.

First, some background: I got into RPGs with AD&D2e and the Marvel Classic/FASERIP games. I ran a LOT of AD&D2e over a number of worlds through the years. It is my favorite version of the game, period. When 3e came along, I got excited, owned several of the books, ran it a few times...and ultimately didn't care for it on the GMing end, due to the amount of heavy lifting on that end. That said, I thought it produced some amazing Ravenloft material, as well as giving us Midnight, which is one of my favorite settings ever. I read 4e, didn't care for it, though I love the D&D Adventure System board games, which use 4e as their base.

I love character options in games. Don't get me wrong, I totally think characters come alive in game play, but I love actual options to mechanically differentiate characters. I was a guy that fully embraced character kits in AD&D2e, and I thought the concept of Feats, Prestige Classes, etc in 3e were great...I just kinda felt like the 3e implementation got way too cumbersome. Also, as much as I love customization, I hate optimization. I hate Min-Maxing. I'm not any good at it, and it doesn't really help you in my games, because I tend to tailor adventures to the PCs, so you will eventually encounter something designed to exploit your weaknesses (not constantly, but it'll happen).

So last night I sat down with 4d6 and rolled up a new 5e character, attempting to recreate my first AD&D2e character, a Wood Elf Fighter named Tanjlock, who became known mostly for his bastard sword, his longbow and for being the party's cook.

D&D Next has Fighters. It also has Wood Elves, so I was off and running! However, it also has optional steps like Backgrounds...where your character came from, and the impact it has on them, such as informing their skills. The suggested Fighter Background is Soldier, but Tanjlock was never a Soldier. Artisan (Cook) on the other hand...and Specialties. These help focus your character's abilities and training. The suggested Specialty  for Fighters is Survivor, which helps beef up Hit Points at level 1. Not bad...but Archer really fits my character more. Now he can snap off two arrows at once, though they only do half damage (but being an elf, his longbow damage is stepped up, so low HP monsters best watch it). Fighters get Fighting Styles which help distinguish how they fight. The playtest packet had a few options to choose from, but Slayer is a great fit for Tanjlock, where he tries to get in and inflict as much damage as possible in Melee (other options include Defender, where you act as a bodyguard for your allies and Duelist for your Inigo Montoya types). Level 1 gives Tanjlock Glancing Blow, which can still let him inflict a small amount of damage on a miss if he rolls a 10 or more on the die when attacking.

So, in about ten minutes, without fully devouring the playtest packet, I had a recreation of my old character, fired up and ready to go. I plan to at least make a character from each class (the playtest packet only has Fighter, Rogue, Cleric and Wizard right now, with Warlock and Sorcerer options alongside Wizard) and race (the packet only has Human, Elf, Dwarf and Halfling, though it references Gnomes, Half-Elves and Half-Orc) to see how it holds up, but it's off to a really good start. The mixing and matching of Backgrounds and Specializations can go a long ways towards customizing characters, and doing so simply. It also seems like it would be SUPER easy to drop new Backgrounds and Specialties into the game, say for campaign worlds and the like. There are no racial or class requirements anymore, with racial adjustments being added to your Ability Scores AND class adjustments being added (for instance, Fighter gives the option of +1 to Strength or Dexterity, which makes sense because Dexterity is now the default stat for Attack Bonuses with smaller weapons).

D&D will never be my primary game again...I'm positive of that...but this character generation test was the most promising experience I've had with D&D in over a decade.

Tommy's Take on Summerland Revised and Expanded

Look, Ma...no bombs!

Summerland is an interesting concept for a PostApoc game, and the final entry in my PostApoc series. I once heard it referred to as a Post Apocalypse game designed by M. Night Shyamalan, and that may not be wrong.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: Summerland Revised and Expanded is a PostApoc game by Fire Ruby Designs, featuring a world that has been consumed by Nature. No atomic bombs here…society was shattered when forests emerged overnight, and this massive forest, called the Sea of Leaves, reached out to folks with The Call, and sucked a good 80% of the population under its thrall, turning them into The Wild. The PCs play Drifters, folks that are so emotionally damaged that they can’t commune well with what’s left of society…a trait that makes them immune to The Call. The PDF is available at RPGNow for $14. I got it in one of the charity bundles a while back.

Drifters have four Qualities – Mind, Empathy, Body and Finesse. You split 20 points among them, on a scale of 2 to 8 (though stats can go as low as 1 or as high as 9 in certain cases). Then you add Tags to each Quality (one per Quality, except for your highest, which gets two, and one of the five tags has to be negative). From there, you define your character’s past and possessions. Your character has a Trauma scale, and you start off about midway down it. The goal is to reach 0, meaning you have conquered your demons and can adjust to society.

Actions are described with Intent and Consequences. What are you intending to do with this action? What is the outcome? That sort of thing. Really like most RPGs, just using specific terminology. Take your Quality, add Tags to get your final score, roll a number of d6s according to the difficulty of the task (2 to 5) and try to roll under your total. If you can get your Total to 13, you have an automatic success.

“Damage” is handled as Distress, which is assigned to each of the four Traits as necessary from the end results of actions. The severity of the Distress can manifest as Cosmetic, Minor or Major, and the book provides examples of each for each of the four Traits. Characters can invoke their Traumas in the hopes of conquering their issues, but this can also cause even more stress in the process. The lower you get your Trauma scale, however, the more susceptible you become to The Call.

The setting is painted in fairly broad strokes, with The Sea of Leaves popping up pretty much wherever you like in the world. Seasons are dramatically amplified, with Spring buzzing with energy, Summer bringing brutal heat, Autumn causing the beasts in the Sea to become restless and Winter being harsh and unforgiving. Most communities are bound to their spot, thanks to The Call, relying on Drifters to help them travel or to move supplies between communities.

The dangers in the Sea of Leaves include other Drifters (being mentally or emotionally damaged is kind of a calling card, after all), The Lost (folks caught in the lure of The Call), The Wild (what The Lost turn into, feral humans), animals, very unnatural animals (some nice examples are given, like a deer that hunts humans and a bear wearing a cloak), and spirits and ghosts. Some interesting story seeds are also included.

The Narrators section stresses that the truth behind The Sea of Leaves is left up to the Narrator to determine, and each PC actually does work towards an endgame: Reaching the end of the Trauma track and finding redemption. It also provides discussion on using Horror, Hope and Magic themes in the game, as well as reference sources for them and scenario ideas. Guidelines are provided on making incidental NPCs, along with a few examples.

The Fallen Leaves supplement is also folded into this book, providing fully developed NPCs, providing examples of the kinds of folks found in The Sea of Leaves, both potential allies and potential adversaries. A number of communities and locations round out this section, like an island that has fallen under a dictatorship and a hunting lodge where the inhabitants are waging war on animals, seeing them as the symbol of the change in the world. A set of random roll charts are provided for making your own communities, as is a character sheet.

WHAT WORKS: Great premise. The idea that nature has just risen up to wreck humanity is intriguing. The art in the book is primarily photographs, making for a very evocative feel to the book. I always appreciate good random roll charts.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK: The writing at times seems to beat around the bush, especially for such a simple system. I do like a little more crunch in my games.

CONCLUSION: Fantastic premise, but one I doubt I would ever use with the system as written. It’s not that the system is inherently BAD…I just prefer a little more meat on my games. The idea that it’s an RPG with a defined endgame is also pretty interesting, as most are open ended to a fault. I’d say it’s well worth reading, even if it’s not my cup of tea for gameplay, especially if you want PostApoc without bombs and mutants.