Games

Heavy Gear resurrected, plus Magic Burner

In the “best news for a while” department, the kick-ass scifi military / power armor game Heavy Gear is coming back in rpg form. Dream Pod 9 and Steve Jackson Games just announced that they will be collaborating on a new 4th edition of the Heavy Gear roleplaying game, coming out in 2009. The line design will be headed by the esteemed HG-guru and line editor John Buckmaster, and will feature a new streamlined version of the Silhouette rule system with focus on making it flow smoothly and fixing some current warts in the design (Complexity, etc). There will probably be 1-2 core books in print format, and then a pile of setting material and support stuff in PDF form (and possibly POD, as well) via e23.

This is fantastic news. I’ve always had a fondness for Heavy Gear, it’s probably the most detailed scifi world in roleplaying today and it tries very hard to be realistic on many levels (well, as much as a game featuring giant power armor suits can be “realistic”). There is enough “realpolitik” in the game to make your head spin. A new edition which would compile it all into smooth form for newcomers is just what the game needs, and we can always hope that it’s reasonably easy to integrate with Heavy Gear Blitz, DP9’s excellent miniatures wargame set in the Heavy Gear world.

There’s also a thread about this on rpg.net.

In other but also game-related news, my signed copy of the Magic Burner limited first batch (#62/200) arrived today, along with a spiffy t-shirt. I’ve only had time for a quick browse so far, started to read the thing on the way to work today. So far, looking extremely good. The guys quote Ursula K LeGuin as one of their main inspirations on “how magic might work”, and that gets huge points from me – I’ve always preferred LeGuin’s (and Cherryh’s) subtle magic to the D&D “eat fireball, kobolds!” style… though that does have its charms, too :). Like the other Burning Wheel books, this is more of a toolkit for building magic for your game than a ready-made list of spells.

If the rest of the book ends up being as cool as the beginning, I may just have to actually run a test game of Burning Wheel at some point. […]

Minireview: Flight of the Red Raven (W3)

Flight of the Red Raven is another strong adventure module from Paizo, this time set up in the snowy north… though the writer has said that it actually ended up being placed further south (in Golarion, Paizo’s game world) than he had intended. Due to that “up north” setting, the writer has decided to use Finnish and pseudo-Finnish names for town inhabitans and sites. While there is nothing wrong with this (Finnish is an obscure language that sounds quite alien enough for a fantasy game), it does cause some hilarity for Finns. A house called “sahtisauna” is quite ok, especially since it’s what it claims to be: “a combination of bathhouse and brewery” – but I have a hard time believing Finnish players will manage to keep a straight face when NPCs have names like “Antero Ikonen”… so some renaming may be in order, for Finns.

The adventure itself is good. There’s a mystical artifact that gets stolen and the PCs go after it. So far so good. The motivation of the thief is understandable and leads on to other complications, and the motivation for the PCs is also well-realized: the artifact was protecting the town from the ravages of winter, and now that it’s gone the town faces real danger from the elements. There is a nice bit of social scenery in the town to set things off, including a celebration with lots of opportunities for mayhem. After that, the action moves on into the wilderness (as befits the “W” designation) and ends up in a very interesting and challenging situation.

One of my favorites from among the newer Pathfinder modules. […]

Minireview: Revenge of the Kobold King (D1.5)

Revenge of the Kobold King was Paizo’s offering for this year’s Free RPG Day. People lucky enough to have a participating shop nearby could pick up a copy for free, the rest could either download a (free) PDF version or buy a print copy for $5. I went for the “buy a copy” option, since that was the only way for me to get a print copy. Me likes print copies.

The module is a sequel to Nicholas Logue’s earlier popular scenario, Crown of the Kobold King, and it’s a lot of fun. In the first part, an up-and-coming Kobold warlord was laid low by a bunch of “pink-skinned sword-waving psychopaths” (from the Kobold point of view). Now, the humiliated (and dead) warlord is given a new lease on (un)life and a chance for revenge. It doesn’t even matter if your players played through the first part or not – one pink-skin looks pretty much like another to a pissed-off undead kobold, anyway.

The action starts off with an attack on some lumberjacks and escalates to the PCs once again assaulting the poor would-be ruler. There’s lots of dark humor involved and it seems like a great little romp, either by itself or as a continuation to the earlier scenario. Either way, good stuff. It’s a quite compact module, clocking in at only 16 pages, but I don’t see that as a bad thing.

Poor Falcon’s Hollow. That place has been subjected to more than a few menaces so far by Paizo’s modules, and it never was a very nice place to begin with – which has always been quite refreshing, for once we have a D&D “campaign base town” which isn’t an idyllic, boring collection of farmers and the required pub (in which to meet dark strangers and be offered quests). Falcon’s Hollow owes a lot more to Charles Dickens than it does to most D&D inspirations. […]

Flee to France!

A quick “what’s up” note, this. Ropecon 2008 came and went, I had a lot of fun despite getting very little sleep. The traditional big VTES tournament was a success once again, I now have a tournament report available for that. The other highlight of the con, for me, was managing to attend Greg Stolze’s demo of his new game, A Dirty World. It was actually the first convention rpg game that I have ever attended, and boy was it worth it. Besides being a kick-ass game designer, Greg proved to be a very cool guy and extremely competent GM. I had a ton of fun playing a heroin-addicted femme fatale…

The rest of the week has been spent in recovery, of sorts. Janka and I are both on vacation now, so we’ve just taken it easy for a while. That said, it feels like it’s been an extremely busy week, I’ve continually been doing something and feel that I managed to only do a small portion of the stuff I had intended. So it goes.

We decided that we needed a short break from all this, so we booked a flight to Paris – leaves tomorrow morning, back on Saturday. It’s been… what, 30 years since I was last there, so I don’t remember much anything, and Janka’s never been there at all. So we’ll spend three days doing the tourist things (Louvre, Notre Dame, the Catacombs, etc) while trying to get by on our extremely limited French vocabulary. Should be fun. I’m trying (in vain) to remember the basic rudiments of French verbs…. and since I know that’s doomed to failure, I’m taking along a phrase book and trying to resist the urge to go for a Monty Python French accent.

Back by the weekend. […]

Minireview: Pathfinder #10, A History of Ashes

In A History of Ashes, Paizo’s second adventure path goes over the halfway point – and it’s quite fitting that the so far city-based game takes a hike for the wild lands, as our heroes are forced to flee Korvosa (or so at least the default plot says, who know what actual PCs will want to do).

This is a nice segment. It’s mostly set in the Cinderlands, an utterly inhospitable wastelands inhabited by the Shoanti (a people heavily patterned after Native Americans). The players will need to make friends with the Shoanti, or at least stop them from attacking long enough to plead their case. This will involve a series of quests which read like they should be a lot of fun, but the author does point out that different groups have different tolerances for “go do quest A, then do quest B” stuff; some of this may need tweaking for some groups. There’s a lot of varied social interaction with native tribes, and of course a lot of action and combat, some of it against a group of assassins the PCs will probably have encountered before.

So far, I’m liking this second adventure path more than the first, and the first was already pretty good. Paizo keeps producing interesting D&D stuff, with some surprisingly adult elements included amidst the hack & slash. […]

Minireview: The Ascension of the Magdalene

Ascension of the Magdalene is a strange creature. It’s a pregen adventure set in 1610 AD Prague, dual-statted for Unknown Armies and D&D (of all things). Yes, it’s a pretty bizarre mix, and ends up being a bit problematic for the adventure in general.

The base plot is interesting, and quite suitable for UA. A notorious and religiously (perhaps) blasphemous painting has vanished, and several factions know where it is and want it for themselves. The player characters are suitable dupes who can be talked into invading a mad emperor’s castle and stealing the thing. So far, so good, and we’re given a nice set of factions and motives so that the startup can be made into something quite a bit more intresting than a “you meet a man in a pub”.

…but then things go awry. The main problem is that UA and D&D are just very, very different games, and you just can’t write up something that works as-is for both. While the writer here has to be given points for even trying, the end result is a strange semi-mystic dungeon crawl which doesn’t quite jive with either game’s tone. There are interesting bits in the thing, and I’m sure that with some effort you could get either a nice historical UA game or a nice D&D dungeon crawl out of this – but it would need some work. For UA, you’d want to remove most of the “dungeon crawl” aspects, and for D&D you’d probably want to increase them.

I hesitate to call this a totally failed product, it doesn’t deserve that. On the other hand, neither does it really work all that well. I think this project was doomed from the start. […]

Minireview: Dreams of the First Age

Dreams of the First Age is the first box set that White Wolf has produced for a roleplaying game (at least as far as I remember). Apparently the production run was beset with all sorts of problems, and the WW guys commented that they’re slowly figuring out why not many companies make boxed sets…

In any case, the end result is very nice. It’s a setting supplement for Exalted, detailing the mythical First Age, when Solars were in charge and everything was great… or not so much. The box contains two books (one on the world, one on the inhabitants and character creation), a pretty full-color cloth map of Creation, a very nice cardboard “battlewheel” with counters, and a fun “Guidebook to Meru” for newly Exalted Solars. A very nice package to my mind, and well worth the money.

The contents are mostly great. The Meru guidebook is written as an “ingame” guidebook and contains lots of fun nuggets and general disdain of the “lower races”. The setting books are interesting – a lot of this stuff we already knew or guessed, but some was quite surprising. Tours into Malfeas to torment the inhabitants some more, floating sky fortresses explicitly named as insults to defeated Primordials… good stuff, and had me smiling more than once. The Solar charms in the character book have received some (deserved) criticism, but I’m not that much of a crunch guy so I can’t get too upset over a few badly written charms; I’d just ignore them, myself. In general the crunch is ok, I think, though as noted the Solar stuff needs a bit of tweaking. I personally found the most interesting bit to be the writeups on the NPCs – we’re given the “past lives” of the Exalted signature characters and lots of other interesting folks. Desus is just as much a wifebeating bastard as we’ve been given to understand, but he’s an interesting bastard. The Dragon-Blooded general Anjei Maruma is given a pretty chilling writeup, in that we know what her personality leads her to do in the future. Ma-Ha-Suchi is hilarious, in that in the First Age he’s an infamous womanizer and seducer, “The Wolf with the Red Roses”. Heh. How things change…

I really liked the thing, mainly because it gave interesting background for a lot of “current” Exalted stuff. If I were to actually run a First Age game, I’d probably go for a “police series” type of thing, with the players as Dragonblood “beat cops” trying to keep their heads above the water while fielding at times insane directives from their Solar superiors. Might be fun. […]

Minireview: Southern Army List One, Southern Republic: Honor, Glory & Steel

The Southern Republic Army List is a book for 1st edition Heavy Gear, detailing the composition of the Southern Republican army. Now, this may sound dry as hell, but once again Dream Pod 9 delivers. While this book does have a huge amount of nitpicking detail, it also manages to be extremely interesting and includes a ton of plot hooks and NPC personalities. It details the structure of the Southern army, but also goes on to give detail on general Southern attitudes, army recuitment, various regiments (with histories), some vehicles, etc. Also included are adventure seeds to get a game running fast, and to top it off you are given four tactical scenarios (for the old HG tactical game).

Far from being a dry list of military “crunch”, this book managed to convey a nice “feel” of how the Southern army moves and thinks, and what its role in society is. If you intend to run a game involving PCs in the Southern army, this book is a must-have – and it gives very useful background detail and plot seeds for pretty much any South-based game.

Heavy Gear is quite easily the most detailed scifi game world in existence at the moment, with multiple thousands of pages of game world information published. This would be quite impressive in itself, but what makes it even more impressive is that the writers usually manage to breathe life into the mountains of technical, political and societal detail. It feels like a living, real world (which was a design aim, as far as I understand). One with giant fighting power armor robot thingies, of course… but even those make sense, mostly. […]

Minireview: Conquest of Bloodsworn Vale (W1)

Conquest of Bloodsworn Vale is one of the first published Pathfinder modules and the first of the (W)ilderness series. I’d rate is as “ok”… it’s a collection of mini-encounters with a “taming the wilderness around a logging town” theme. The town itself is featured in many Pathfinder modules, so you could well build a mini-campaign around events in this area of the Paizo campaign world.

The encounters are mostly interesting, though of course they follow the standard D&D “go and kill the monsters” theme. Some parts are a bit illogical, but no huge problems. The end Big Bad has enough flavor to be interesting, even though he is only featured in a small part of a fairly compact adventure module. I get the feel that how this one plays will depend a lot on the player group itself. The adventure is more of a sandbox than anything else, so plot coherence and advancement are largely things the GM will have to improvise on the fly. At least it’s not too railroady.

So… nothing exceptional, but reads like it should be fun with the right group of players. […]