Games
Minireview: HoL & BUTTery HOLsomeness
First published by White Wolf’s Black Dog subsidiary, HoL is an (in)famous parody of lots of roleplaying games that happens to also be an rpg in itself. I’ve even heard that some deranged people have managed to play actual games of it… though this may be on the same validity level as reports of Bigfoot. There’s also an expansion game called BUTTery HOLsomeness, the name of which should give some indication of the level of humor here. Yes, we’re deep into Beavis & Butthead and South Park territory.
Fortunately I happen to love South Park and actually find parts of Beavis & Butthead funny, so I found this thing to be an extremely funny read. The humor does get a tad repetitive at times, and the fact that it’s hand-written & drawn instead of typeset makes it exhausting to actually read… but it’s still funny as hell, mostly.
So, what’s it about? Seems that in the far future, a bored teenager has conquered the known universe and rules over it as Emperor, under the polite fiction of a Confereration of Worlds (C.O.W.). There’s also a universal church (& fast-food franchise), ruled by a Megapope. There are some invading aliens called the S.N.E.E. (Sedud Neerg Elttil Esoht, or “Those Little Green Dudes” written backwards). Everyone is gloriously happy (officially), and the ones who aren’t are shipped to Human Occupied Landfill (HoL) which may or may not be Earth. Nobody cares.
Player characters are all people or creatures who have been sent to HoL. Their life sucks, and tends to be nasty, short and brutish.
Oh, and only men (or at least, “non-women”) are sent to HoL. It’s never made clear what happens to the women, but they don’t enter HoL – leaving the stage clear for one of the gangs of HoL, the Sodomy Bikers. Yes, the name says it all. There are also other gangs roaming about, but none of them are friendly. The game itself is mainly an exercise in “kill or be killed.” You have wonderful skills like “Operate Starship and Chew Gum at the Same Time”, “Making Sharp Things Go Through Soft Things That Scream and Bleed”, “That Psycho Bruce Lee Shit” and “Whining Until You Get What You Want”. Among others. The pregen characters include a pedophile priest, a gamer geek and Elvis. Yes, Elvis.
The BUTTery HOLsomeness book adds actual character generation to the game, with a random background generation that spoofs the one in Traveler (yes, of course you can die during it!). It also contains personal totem animals, like the “sloth” and the “bush baby”.
The whole thing is hard to describe, but damn funny – if you’ve read or played enough roleplaying games before. The humor will probably be pretty opaque otherwise. […]
The Witcher considered pretty damn good
A funny thing happened some months back. I was hunting for a copy of Knights of the Old Republic on eBay since I heard so much praise for the game, and found one on sale for a reasonable price. The same guy was also selling a copy The Witcher, so I went “might as well check it out” and got both games. I didn’t know much about the Witcher… a friend had praised it to me, but Yahtzee’s typically hilarious Zero Punctuation review gave some pause. Sure, he hates most games, but still…
Anyway, the games finally arrived and I checked them out. KotOR had very dated graphics (no surprise, it’s a bit old) and pretty cheesy dialogue. It seemed fun enough, but after playing a bit I decided to check out Witcher. Some time near midnight, I noticed I was still playing and KotOR was the loser here.
Despite being sceptical, I have to say I liked (and still like) the Witcher a lot. Some of the complaints about it are quite justified. The controls and inventory does take a bit of getting used to, it is huge and slow-paced, some of the dialogue is extremely corny, and it does seem that being a scar-faced & white-haired swordsman is an instant sexual turnon for the babes, which can get a bit silly at times. To me, none of those quibbles got in the way of enjoying the hell out of the game.
It has a nicely east-European feel to it (natural due to the developer being a Polish game house), and is much more related to Conan-era sword & sorcery -fantasy than D&D fluff. Taken in that context, the big-chested babes lining up to have sex with the hero actually are quite in-genre. To be honest, I found the open inclusion of sexuality in the game quite refreshing, most fantasy games totally ignore the whole thing and go the “family friendly” route. It’s nice to find a somewhat more “adult” game now and then – even though some parts of said game may come off as a bit juvenile.
You play Geralt, who is a “Witcher”: a bio-enhanced & sterile member of an ancient order of monster hunters. Some bad guys organize an attack on the order and steal some stuff, and it’s off you go to fix things. The whole thing is based on some fantasy books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, apparently. Haven’t read them.
The best thing about the game (other than the babes lining up to… ahem) is the shades-of-gray morality and freedom to do real moral choices (sometimes with no easy answers). There is no “good” or “evil” here. It’s also a damn good-looking game, which never hurts. The plotting is pretty ok; there are some “FedEx quests”, but also some more interesting scenarios.
By the way, the U.S. version (which I got) is slightly censored – the pin-up pictures of the girls you sleep with are not quite as explicit as in the European version… so get the Euro version (or Enhanced, see below).
One additional small negative that needs mention: the difficulty varies wildly. Some fights are dead easy, some are extremly hard and need a zillion reloads to complete… which is especially galling if the fight in question happens to automatically start after a cutscene, so you’re forced to watch the same cutscene (with dialogue choices to make) N times. Grah. Fortunately the really hard bits seem to be rare.
I played the thing quite a bit, but then heard that the developers are working on an Enhanced Edition. Apparently the reason the English version of the game has pretty corny dialogue is that a large part of the original (Polish) dialogue is left out, and what remains has been “dumbed down” a bit – this new version includes a redone version of the dialogue and voice acting, which should enhance things and make some of the dialogue less cringe-worthy. In addition, it should include some more content, some gameplay enhancements, even better graphics, etc. In short, I decided that the game is so good that I want to wait until the new version is available (in September) and then start over with the game.
So yeah, I’m buying another copy of the game, when it becomes available. That’s pretty rare, for me.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t (quite) a new Baldur’s Gate 2… but it does come close, at times. Much better than Neverwinter Nights 2 in any case. I was extremely impressed, despite some small flaws. […]
Minireview: Dungeons & Dragons, 4th edition
Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition is probably the most-hyped and also the most controversial new tabletop rpg product in recent times. Is it any good? Well… yeah. Kinda sorta.
I stopped playing/running D&D ages ago, when AD&D 1st edition was the current one. It was a fun first tabletop rpg game, but the limitations of the (frankly crappy) ruleset had started to grate at that point. I moved on to Rolemaster, and then on to other games. I mostly skipped the 3.x phase, and don’t really know much about that ruleset; or let’s say: I know enough about it to know I don’t much care for it.
Honestly, I doubt that I would have picked up this new version had not Amazon had an amazingly low (preorder) price for it; I got it for under half price as compared to local game stores, and that’s including shipping. At that price, I went “hell, why not” and ordered the thing. I have to feel a bit sorry for game store owners, there is no way they can compete with that kind of price competition.
Complaints about this version abound on the net. It’s gone very far in the WoW direction. It’s dumbed down. It has nothing except combat.
You know what? The complaints are mostly correct. It has taken a lot of cues from WoW. It is pretty dumbed-down (or “simplified”, if you prefer). And it is pretty much only about combat.
Thing is, I’m not seeing those as being totally negative things. Trying to appeal to the WoW crowd does make a lot of sense. Tabletop rpgs still offer a lot of things that you simply cannot get from WoW (or such), and lowering the barrier of entry makes all kinds of sense. The dumbing down is a mixed bag. One one hand, at times the text reads like it’s aimed at 8-yr olds, which is extremely annoying. One the other, the mechanics seem pretty smooth, and I have no love for 3.x’s complexity (which to me gives very little in return). The rules feel pretty slick, in fact, in spite of the steals from computer games (aura effects, group roles, easy healing, etc). The game wants to emphasize fun, it seems, and that’s good in my book.
About the combat… well, hmph. I’ve never really seen D&D as anything but a fantasy combat simulator, to me it’s never even tried to much support the roleplaying aspects. So the fact that 4e is pretty much a fantasy combat simulator and in some respects more tactical board game than roleplaying game doesn’t surprise me much or seem all that odd. On the other hand, I can well understand people who have gotten used to running more “serious” games with the 3.x ruleset being turned off by this new incarnation. In addition, this edition is even more geared towards using miniatures than any previous one.
To sum: to me, 4e looks pretty sleek, and it seems designed to do the lightweight dungeon romp thing pretty well. On the other hand, it seems very lightweight and at times I get the feeling it’s aimed at younger kids. I can understand the criticisms it’s receiving, but I can also understand the praises. What you think of this game depends a lot on what you’re expecting and what your background is.
The core rules here seem very fun and sleek, like I said, and I might even try to run a purely-for-fun dungeon romp with this at some point. I get the feeling that the game succeeds in doing what it sets out to do, provide a easily approachable tactical dungeon monster mash game, with some light roleplaying elements included on the side. It’s just that what it set out to do doesn’t match what some people would like. C’est la vie.
The books are the classic three. First off, a Player’s Guide which details the character options, the main rules, and most of what you really need in order to play. Second, the Dungeon Master’s Guide which contains detail on running the game and some additional rules, and finally the Monster Manual, with lots of stuff to kill. Production values are high, as expected, and the organization is mostly good. Small negative points for the lack of a good index, spells are organized by level and if you want to quickly find a given spell you have to resort to leaving through the book – which sucks. The Monster Manual is nice in that it gives lots of variations of each beastie, no longer do we have the uniform “all instances of a given monster are the same” thing. Points for that.
Trying to look at this game objectively: it seems to be a professionally designed game of dungeon looting, with heavy emphasis on tactical combat. The rules give the impression of being quite heavily tested, and play balance has won out over realism in all cases (not that D&D was ever realistic in any degree whatsoever). It seems like a fairly solid game, and perhaps later supplements may even widen the focus a bit, so one might actually call it a “roleplaying” game without putting tons of conditionals and disclaimers all over the place.
If you’re heavily invested in the 3.x ruleset and like it, you probably won’t like this new version too much.
So: purely as a game, I’ve give WotC pretty high marks for this. It’s still D&D, but it has been heavily tweaked to do at least one thing (dungeon crawls) very well and it contains some nice new innovations from computer games and some indie games. The price of that is some amount of “dumb-down” and the near-lack of meaningful non-combat options.
In the “black marks” department, we have the whole heavily bungled launch, the whole poison-pill GSL license drama (which shows the weasel lawyer side of WotC/Hasbro pretty clearly), the bungled and buggy “D&D Insider / Gleemax” web support thing, etc etc. But all of that is topic for another discussion. […]
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. […]
Minireview: Seven Swords of Sin (D2)
If we’re honest, for a Paizo module Seven Swords of Sin (by James Sutter & the Paizo staff) isn’t all that good. The module’s origins as an Paizo-internal “let’s write a list of deadly traps!” project shows all too well; while I like good deathtrap dungeons this isn’t a very good one – it’s just a random series of deathtraps strung together with an extremely vague plot.
It’s not strictly bad, I’m sure a fun evening of dungeon crawl could result from this. It’s just not very good either, there are better variants of this theme available. Some of the rooms/traps are inventive, though, and I suspect the best use for this module would be as a trap resource to insert into other adventures.
The plot, such as it is, deals with yet another evil sorceress trying to awaken ancient powers through yet another ancient artifact. Film at 11.
Meh. […]
Minireview: Pathfinder #9, Escape From Old Korvosa
In Escape From Old Korvosa, the PCs are expected to exit the city of Korvosa for the first time. As before, this points to the biggest problem with this adventure path: getting the players to follow the plot. Before this, you’ve had to give them reasons to stay in the city even though things have gone downhill fast. Now, you need to get the thinking about leaving. Fortunately you are given lots of help and player motivations, so it’s not as doomed an endeavour as you might think – but still, the GM will have to come up with Plan B (and C, and D, and…) in case the players don’t follow the breadcrumb trail.
This installment is half event-based urban encounter (like the previous two parts) and half dungeon crawl. The dungeon does seem quite interesting and has a reason to exist, so I suspect it would work pretty well in practice to break the game flow a bit. As before, the city encounters are very nice and varied – the players are given the opportunity to play Blood Pig, among other unsavory entertainments.
The whole thing seems pretty solid, with the disclaimer above about a fairly linear plot that needs to be followed in some fashion.
The rest of the contents are good, as always – we have some more new monsters (this time with an Indian style, because of module plot reasons), a new Pathfinder Journal installment, and such. The overall quality remains high. […]
Minireview: Delta Green: Eyes Only
An alien conspiracy 160 million years in the making.
A group so powerful, their leader may be a god.
An accident so terrible it threatens the past, present and future.
To DELTA GREEN, it’s just another goddamn Night at the Opera.
Finally got around to reading this. Wow, once again; I have yet to be disappointed by any Delta Green book. This is extremely good stuff and quite creepy to boot.
Delta Green: Eyes Only collects three old and long (long!) out-of-print chapbooks for DG, and adds in three new scenarios (each one built around one of the chapbooks) and some extra articles. The first section/chapbook, “The Machinations of the Mi-Go”, concerns the Mi-Go (no surprise) and expands on their operations from what we’re told in the core book. While good, this section is maybe the weakest, simply because there isn’t all that much new here – lots of nice expansions on previous ideas, though. The second section, “The Fate”, deals with that organization (also initially introduced in the corebook), and here they are shown to be even scarier than initially depicted – which is understandable given the “default” answer presented here as to who/what Stephen Alzis actually is. Nice character detail on all the “Lords” is given, in addition to some supporting cast.
The last non-adventure section, “Project Rainbow”, is perhaps the best, and it’s completely original to this book – namely, the DG version of the Philadelphia Experiment. Very creepy and very cool.
Next up we have the scenarios. First is “A Night on Owlshead Mountain” which is a very nice scenario connected with the Mi-Go – but in a pleasantly subtle way. Probably the easiest scenario in this bunch to integrate with an existing campaign. Second up is “Artifact Zero”, which is a chilling and extremely deadly scenario built around the Project Rainbow stuff. Really good scenario, but also so ridiculously deadly that it makes Convergence from the core book look a bit tame. Run this for established play groups only if you’re prepared to lose a lot of PCs. I’d personally run this as a one-shot, and continue on with survivors (if any). You need a ridiculous level of paranoia to survive this thing. Not a bad thing, but… well, you have been warned. This one is nasty and unfair.
Last up is “Holy War”, which concerns internal Fate politics and the fallout of that into the hands of DG and other groups, set in New York just after 9/11. Reads like a nice adventure, but probably best suited for more experienced agents.
All in all, I was extremely impressed with this book, it continues the very high level of quality that Delta Green books are known for. If you want some nasty nihilism into your modern-day occult/supernatural games, you can’t really go wrong with Delta Green material.
As an aside, Scott Glancy just announced on the DG mailing list that a softcover reprint of “Eyes Only” is going to the printers today – so expect to see that available from some places in the near future. Good news for those who missed the original 1000-copy print run, which sold out fast. […]
Minireview: Heavy Gear Blitz, Locked & Loaded
Heavy Gear Blitz L&L is the latest and greatest incarnation of the Heavy Gear tactical miniatures game. This version is an improved version of the original “Blitz!” ruleset, tweaked based on playtest and fan feedback over about a year of playing. It also includes updated versions of the 3 faction books, so this book is all you need (in addition to the minis, of course). The deluxe version (one I have) is in full color, the “normal” version has some color pages but is mostly B&W.
Having read the rules but not having played any games yet: the rules seem to be a nice balance between tactical options and speed of play. I’m mostly clear on how the game works, though I’d have to re-read the sections on Indirect Fire, Concealment and such before actually trying it out. With any luck, I’ll be able to coax some local players into running a demo/tutorial game, at Ropecon if nowhere else.
I’m currently planning a Paxton/PRDF 1000 TV force, based on some feedback I’ve gotten on the DP9 Blitz forum. I recently ordered some Gear minis for it from Noble Knight, and am waiting for the Coyote tankstrider minis to be available (sometime later this month) for the big(ger) guns. After that, I need to get me some paints and modeling tools, and start learning the construction + paint thing. Scary.
With the disclaimer that I have extremely limited experience with wargames in general, and that I haven’t actually played this yet: this seems to be a pretty solid ruleset, with lots of cool options, flavor and tactics. Looking forward to trying it out. […]
Indie excitement
Lots of anticipated indie rpgs (or supplements) are suddenly popping up. Maybe it’s the influence of Origins and the upcoming Gencon, or maybe it’s just synchronicity.
First off, John Wick’s eagerly-anticipated “anti-D&D” game Houses of the Blooded is finally on its way to the printers, and us preorder people got our PDFs last night. There’s no way I can give any sort of impression on the thing yet, it’s 400+ pages and I’ll probably wait to seriously read it via the print copy, when it arrives. There’s something very cool about this game, the “fictious myth as history” attitude that’s embedded in it and the general “everything that is true in D&D is not true here” thing. It looks complex, it looks like something I need to run at some point.
The second event, also last night, was the “Burning Wheel Summer Surprise”, which turned out to be the (very!) long-anticipated Magic Burner book. A 200-copy run of preorders, signed and numbered, went on sale last night at about 23:00 Finnish time – and the burningwheel.org server promptly melted. I don’t think Luke and the guys quite anticipated the demand here. After over an hour of retries and re-refreshes, I finally managed to place an order for a copy (plus a spiffy limited-run shirt). The run sold out sometime during the night, so if you didn’t get a copy you’ll have to wait until the normal print run goes on sale and have to do without a signed copy of the book. The pain, the pain…
There’s also Don’t Lose Your Mind (a Don’t Rest Your Head expansion) coming up, in addition to Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor and Curriculum of Conspiracy (add-ons for the uber-cool Monsters and Other Childish Things). It’s a good time to be a gamer.
Minireview: Criminal Histories
Criminal Histories is a small pure-crunch supplement for Paranoia XP – in a way it’s a rules plug-in module, replacing the stock character background stuff in the core book with a ton of table-driven goodness. In a classic Paranoia game character backgrounds didn’t really matter since clones died so fast, but with the new “Straight” gameplay mode characters might even (gasp) survive a game or two and get an opportunity to utilize background resources. Even when playing in more classic mode, the expanded backgrounds give the GM lots of new ways to get the characters in trouble, and for them to stab each other in the back.
In essence, this is 60+ pages of tables which help you quickly generate the “past life” of a Paranoia character. What did they do before they were promoted (or demoted, as may be) to Troubleshooter status? What enemies did they make along the way? Did they actually learn some useful extra skills along the way? This book will tell you, without needing any of that nasty “GM improvisation” stuff (that sounds like “work”, and “work” is something Paranoia GMs should avoid).
I’d use this if I were to run a game of Paranoia, no question. It provides lots of extra detail for little extra effort, and can give you (as the GM) evil extra ideas. […]
