Minireview: Heavy Gear Character Compendium 1
Character Compendium 1 is an old supplement to 1st edition Heavy Gear – and it’s really, really good. It’s also the only “character compendium”, so the number “1” is a bit redundant.
In a nutshell, this is a list of NPC characters. Some are movers and shakers in the HG world, some are just normal everyday people. So far, so good… but what makes it so good? The same thing as with most HG books: amazing amount of interesting detail. All characters have a “chesspiece” symbol next to them, denoting their importance to world affairs and the metaplot should you choose to follow that. Each is given a long writeup and most are given full stats. Most NPCs here are gathered into groups, and include relationship maps inside the group. Characters are given a multitude of options on how to use them in a game (as “ally”, “enemy”, “resource”, etc). As noted, the amount and quality of detail is just amazing.
This book is quite integrated with the Heavy Gear game world, and while you could use this as a general NPC resource for a scifi game, you’ll get the most mileage if you use this as intended, as an NPC resource for Heavy Gear. Simply put, this is probably the best book of this kind I’ve ever read. Far from being dry and boring to read (as I feared), it turned out to be quite fascinating.
Books of this quality are the main reason I love Dream Pod 9 games.
Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:42 Posted in Games
Tags heavy gear
