/var/log/orava

Minireview: Spirit Slayers (Hunter: the Vigil)

Spirit Slayers is the last of the support books for Hunter: the Vigil. Despite the somewhat confusing name, this is (mostly) a book about werewolves, and mostly as antagonists. The title comes form the fact that in the new Werewolf game, werewolves and spirits have a very symbiotic and also somewhat antagonistic relationship. This book attempts to present both werewolves and spirits, and the role of hunters as “spirit slayers”. This duality, while an understandable design decision, somewhat dilutes the book.

It’s not a bad book by any means; the material on werewolves is quite solid and presents them as primal beasts who also have a very human side, and therefore have the potential to also be allies… or at least neutrals. The book follows the same format as the others; we’re given some historical explanations for what werewolves are, so the GM can tailor his/her werewolves as “something a bit different”. Then there are some new Compacts and a new Conspiracy. None of those are really brilliant, but all are quite ok. The Conspiracy, “Les Mysteres”, is perhaps the most interesting, as it presents a disparate group of people who have a tight bond with spirits (much in the Voodoo/Loa direction but not limited to that).

The rest of the book contains simplified rules for werewolves and spirits… and here the fact that the book tries to cover two aspects becomes a small problem. The werewolf rules seem ok, though they are very compact… but that leaves precious little room for rules on spirits. Since spirits in the new WoD can be quite complex entities, this makes the ultra-simplified rules here not worth much. In practice, a GM will probably need at least The Book of Spirits to make sense of things.

The end has the usual GM advice on how to these critters in a game.

While perhaps the weakest of the Hunter support books, that’s purely because it tries to cover a bit too much ground. The writing here is excellent and the ideas presented mostly interesting.

As a whole, the new Hunter game like is very good. It does what most people expected the first Hunter to do, and it does it well and with style. If you’re looking for a monster-hunting game, you’ll want to take a good long look at this one. I can’t find much to criticize in it as a game line (other than it’s a bit short, a book or two extra would not have hurt).

Minireview: Second Edition Technical Manual - Terranovan Technology (Heavy Gear)

The 2nd edition Technical Manual is one of those near-must-have books if you’re running a Heavy Gear game. Far from being just an equipment list, it’s a compendium of the technological and scientific methods generally used on Terra Nova. The detail level here is incredible, the book goes into miniscule detail on many levels of arms, armor and general tech construction. Sure, you don’t absolutely need all this in a game – but it provides a great extra level of realism if you can actually describe some of the materials and technologies used.

The book starts with basic materials and construction info, and goes on to detail and list actual equipment, with side treks into various sub-areas as needed. This book doesn’t contain lists of gears; there are other books for that. This details pretty much everything else, from guns to communication equipment. The back of the book does contain a very detailed schematic of an example gear (a variant of the popular Hunter model), with cutaway views, pictures of the control joysticks, etc. I don’t remember seeing this stuff in the previous books; it’s really nice to have pictures to show to the players about how a gear is actually piloted and how a pilot fits into one.

The second half of the book contains the “Vehicle Construction System”, a mechanic for constructing pretty much any custom vehicle you want into your game. It looks medium-complex, but not too bad. Great stuff if you want to keep track of Threat Levels, and/or figure out how much something might cost and how difficult it might be to build.

A pretty awesome book, all in all, if you want to bring some extra level of technical detail into your Heavy Gear game or if you want to design some custom vehicles with full game stats. This is also a useful book for players of the miniatures game: all the various weapons and armor options are described here (with nice pictures), and that aforesaid cutaway view of a gear is nice extra detail.

Minireview: Masks of the Living God (Pathfinder)

Masks of the Living God (by Jason Bulmahn) is the second part of a new Pathfinder adventure trilogy which began with Crypt of the Everflame. I really liked that module and thought that it was an excellent 1st level starter adventure… and I’m happy to report that this “part two” keeps up the good work.

Here the PCs follow the clues about a new somewhat menacing religion centered around a “Living God” (clues found in the previous adventure), and find that the nearby city of Tamran houses a chapter of that cult. Here it’s assumed that the PCs will try to infiltrate the cult, posing as new recruits – but enough info is given here to fuel a more straightforward assault too (or a sneaky thief-style approach). Since the default is infiltration, a lot of good info is given here about NPCs and the normal operating procedures of the cult.

I always appreciate adventures which are something other than just “see-monster-kill-monster”, so this one gets high marks from me. The straightforward violence option would probably result in a total party kill anyway; both because they’d be fighting a full cult, and because the authorities (such as they are) would probably look very dimly on an armed assault on a (supposedly peaceful) religious cult in the middle of town. While infiltration is probably the most fun option, I can see a sneaky spy approach working pretty well too. The cult headquarters is well mapped out, and the key NPC personalities should help in fleshing out the place.

The adventure provides clues which lead on to the next and last part, the upcoming City of Golden Death. Based on the high quality of these two first installments, I have high hopes for that one. Regardless of that, these two should provide a very nice kickoff to a Pathfinder campaign, should you need that.

Minireview: The Infernal Syndrome (Pathfinder #28)

With The Infernal Syndrome, Paizo’s Council of Thieves adventure path moves into its second half. Written by Clinton Boomer and James Jacobs, the basic idea here is pretty fun: an ancient mansion in the city has been powered by an imprisoned devil, and the mechanism in charge of that is slowly breaking down with bad consequences for the city around it. Unfortunately, like the previous installment in this adventure path, this too ends up being one big dungeon crawl. It’s not a bad one, but still… one of the major points of this adventure path was supposed to have been the city setting. Even though the first parts used that to good effect, these middle ones could pretty much have been set anywhere. The city is supposed to slowly be sinking into anarchy, but here that’s only on the “tell, don’t show” level. Sure, the GM can add stuff to make that point, but… Curse of the Crimson Throne did that sort of thing much better, there the city really did feel like it was at the verge of collapse.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t bad, and the city around the mansion(s) does figure into things; it’s just seriously underused as a setting element. There’s more combat here than I’d like, but that’s a standard complaint I have about almost all “D&D”-style pregen adventures. It’s natural, these games are mostly fantasy combat simulators… but still. It gets a bit old.

To the writers’ credit, many of the encounters here can be solved by other means (than combat, that is), and some of the encounters are quite interesting. It’s an ok adventure module, but fails to really be anything special.

Minireview: White Night, by Jim Butcher

Another installment of “Harry has a bad day (or three)”. White Night is the ninth book in the Dresden Files series, and it continues to uphold the “high-quality entertainment” label. I swear, they must dust some crack cocaine on the paper during the printing process, nothing else explains the sheer addictiveness of these things.

This time round, it’s a spate of murders (made to look like suicides), apparently targeting the Chicago supernatural community’s low end of the power scale. After one more low-power mage gets killed, Murphy pulls Harry into the mess – this time unofficially, since officially the cases are clear-cut suicides. Initially puzzled by the whole thing, Harry slowly uncovers clues. Unfortunately, all the clues seem to point towards his vampiric White Court brother, Thomas…

Well, of course things aren’t that simple. The stakes mount, and the end is explosive (to say the least). The power level is generally high here; Harry is now a Warden and is starting to be in the heavyweight leagues of the supernatural community. This of course reflects in the enemies he attracts. We find out some new things about Mouse the Temple Dog, and Molly is starting to grow up and test her limits (not always with the greatest of success).

What can I say… another good book in the Dresden Files series. Sure, it’s pure entertainment, but it’s well-written and keeps up the pace nicely. Now and then, “just entertainment” is just the thing you need.

Gaming weekend

Busy weekend.

On Saturday I ran a release tournament for the new Heirs to the Blood set. Went well; we had 19 players and these release tournament things are always fun. I had personally avoided reading spoilers much at all so for me the cards were largely new surprises, but even for people who had bought some the previous week (when it went on sale) it was probably the first chance to actually play with them.

The win went to Tuomas Vuokko, playing with Salubri Antitribu. Tuomas has been in torpor for almost a year now due to suffering a bunch of pretty horrific real-life events… but he decided to join this at the last minute and proceeded to win the whole thing. As an amusing side, all the players with game wins were playing Kiasyd/Lasombra, Tuomas was the only one able to get a game win with something else. Impressive.

Sunday I ran another segment of my ongoing Exalted game. I had done quite a bit of prep, due to having no real certainty of how the players would react to the things I threw at them… so even though I suspected they’d go for Plan A, I also had to have Plans B,C and D available in some form. Mostly things went as I had suspected (though there were a few surprises). The gang is now in the Northern Wyld Borderlands, planning an assault on a massive Pale Hunter fortification, all because a young Lunar managed to land on their lap.

I was pretty happy with the thing, especially since a major part of it had been written from scratch.

Playtest Review: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, 3rd edition

The Warhammer fantasy game world has always been a very popular one, and some of the old campaigns for it (Enemy Within, especially) have a near-legendary status. The second edition of the game, published (mostly) by the Black Library imprint, was very popular and the whole game line consists of a lot of books. It’s always been a fun setting, as far as I know, but it has always also had a very “retro” game mechanic that hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s been serviceable by most accounts, but nothing all that fantastic.

So, when Fantasy Flight Games got the Warhammer license and announced that they are working on a new edition, the Internet rumor mill started buzzing again. The buzz intensified when some details became clear: it would (gasp!) use a dice pool system, would (gasp!) include some mechanics in card form, etc etc. Many of the initial fears were along the lines: “it’s a board game, not a roleplaying game!”. These complaints intensified when it became clear that the release was a gigantic boxed set, to the tune of a $100 retail price.

So now Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition is here. What is it? How does it play? I’ll try to answer some of that, but I do have one disclaimer: I’ve never played either 1st or 2nd edition of the game. I’m halfway familiar with some of the material, but really… I’m a relative newbie to the Warhammer world. I’ll inspect the game on its own merits, not “compared to 2nd edition sourcebook N”.

I’ll start with “what is it?”. First off, it’s a real roleplaying game. It’s in no form or fashion a board game. It uses some mechanics from board games (and card games) to keep track of things, but the game itself is a pure tabletop rpg. The box contains all you need for a GM + 3 players; only one person in the play group actually needs to buy this, assuming a group of 4 people.

The box is big, and contains 4 books (total a bit under 300 pages) and piles upon piles of different counters, cards, sheets and… stuff. It’s all a bit overwhelming at first, but there is a method to the madness. Fun fact: the page count of the books alone is actually higher than the 2nd edition corebook – and you get a ton of stuff in addition to the books. One book contains the core rules, one is a GM sourcebook, one is detail for playing priests, and the last one is about playing mages. All in all, the books are nicely laid out, and most things are clear enough. However, some of the rules are spread out among multiple books, making some rule details a bit hard to figure out. It’s by no means the worst I’ve seem (compared to Burning Wheel this is a cakewalk), but still… the books could have been a bit better organized, in an ideal world. I do have to give kudos to the GM section; it’s excellent, and contains lots of “indie” stuff like “say yes”, emphasis on a three-act structure, and lots of nice general advice.

In general, this game has taken a lot of cues from “indie” games. I can see bits and pieces of Burning Wheel, Spirit of the Century and other games in here. The design is quite unconventional, and in most places extremely innovative. It’s not without its problems (I’ll get to those later), but in general: this is the most innovative roleplaying design to come from a major publisher for a long time. Not everyone will like it, but I do think that most people who are interested in rpgs should take a look at it. There are lots of cool ideas in here.

To give an exact description of the mechanics would take more space than I want to spend here, so I’ll give a “nutshell” summary.

You still have a traditional “character” sheet, but it’s enhanced with numerous cards. First off, you get a large-format card detailing your current profession. This contains main info about the career. You also get a smaller career card, with the career special ability. This is a bit kludgy imho, that stuff should have been on the main career card… I think they just ran out of space on the main card, here. Anyway, in addition to those you get a bunch of abilities which you attach to your career card into dedicated “slots”. Some of these may be swapped in and out during play. Last off, you get a bunch of Action cards, which represent your normal actions.

Traditionally, this is stuff that would have been represented by written lines on a character sheet. Here they are pre-printed cards. The advantage is that it vastly reduces the need for book lookup during play, since the cards contain much of the mechanics. This is good. It also allows for visual representations of when the action (or whatever) can be used again, via “recharge tokens” placed on the cards.

Then there is the dice pool, which is very cool. It consists of a bunch of custom dice, with symbols on them. The dice have different numbers of faces… some are d6, some d8, etc. You collect a “pool” of them, based on various factors: you base attribute for a skill gives you blue dice, skill training adds yellow “expert” dice, your “stance” (see below) modifies some of your blue dice to green/red, the difficulty of the action adds purple “challenge” dice, and lastly you may get white “fortune” dice and black “misfortune” dice. Once you have your pool you roll it, and the result gives you a “multidimensional” result: in addition to saying whether you succeed or fail, it also provides good or bad side effects which are not tied to success. So you might succeed, but get a bad side-effect. Or vice versa.

All that may sound complicated, but it’s actually quite quick to learn and works really nicely. Good job there, FFG.

There are lots of details I could mention, but I’ll only note two specific innovative extra things here.

First, the party sheet. This is the first rpg that I’ve run into which details the group of player characters as a separate entity (in addition to the PCs). So after the players create their characters, they need to decide what kind of party they are. Are they Intrepid Explorers? Or a Gang of Thugs? Or Brash Young Fools? In addition to providing some mechanical effects, the party sheet also serves to remind the players of that important thing: “why are we together in the first place?”. It’s a nice idea.

Secondly, stances. Each character gets a “stance meter”, which depends on his/her career and other things. This consists of a neutral middle point, and a number of “conservative” and “reckless” spaces on either side. In “encounter mode” (the mode you use to resolve most things), characters decide their current stance on that meter. That setting has an effect on how all their actions resolve; doing stuff “recklessly” nets potentially higher benefits, but also runs higher risks. It’s a very nice mechanic, and a clear evolution from many “indie” game ideas.

Ok. Up to now I’ve talked about how the game looks and reads. Based on just those, my impression was very favorable: the production values were excellent (as usual for FFG productions), the mechanics contained a ton of innovative bits, and the thing was still a traditional rpg at the core.

I did have a few issues:

• The price is high. Sure, you get a lot for your $100, and the box contains enough for a GM + 3 players – the equivalent set in D&D 4th edition would actually cost you more. Still, it’s a lot of money. I personally think it’s worth the price, though (and you can get it for a lot less than that $100 via Amazon, for example).

• As noted, the organization of the rulebooks could be a bit clearer. In addition, there are mistakes and omissions here and there, you need the FAQ document to figure some things out. It’s not horrible, just in the “could be better” department. Also, there is no index.. but FFG actually provides an online ”living index” instead, which is a nice idea and might prove better than a normal index in the long run.

• After reading the thing, I was a bit concerned about the amount of table space this thing would probably take, and the amount of fiddly bits (cards, counters, etc) you had to keep track of.

• There are only a limited number of races, careers, etc available here. I don’t find this to be much of a problem, the design here makes it easy to expand things as the game develops. It does feature less initial choice in those matters than earlier editions; to me that’s no big deal, but it of course affects the price-vs-value proposition for some people.

Luckily enough, my housemates were all home the next weekend after I got this, so I recruited them as victims for a quick playtest. One had never played any sort of roleplaying game before, one had run some 2nd edition Warhammer, and one some 1st edition… so a nice mix of people there. I decided to run the “Eye for an Eye” demo scenario included with the box.

Character creation went fairly smoothly, though at that point there was quite a bit of “pass me the book” going on… some printouts of relevant tables etc might have helped. The players settled on a priest of Shallaya, an Agent and a Mercenary – forming a gang of Brash Young Fools. After a brief into, off they went into the wilderness.

Things started off with a combat encounter, which ended up taking the bulk of the session. It almost ended with a Total Party Kill also; I should have had the Beastmen break morale earlier than they did, but since I wasn’t familiar with the system I didn’t realize the problems fast enough. The PC group had only one really functional combat character, and against a horde of beastmen.. well, while the Mercenary could hold his own for quite a while, it was a losing battle. In the end, one of the characters would have died if we went by the rules, but I decided to fudge it and “just” leave him critically wounded.

All in all, the combat mechanics seemed ok. Needs a bit of practice to get it to run smoothly, and that one fight went on a bit too long due to the PCs being a bit underpowered – but in general, the system seemed to work nicely. Players reported that having the combat powers right in from of them on cards helped a lot, both with book-keeping and with figuring out capabilities in general.

After that we got to the “investigation” section at a hunting lodge. Things proceeded pretty nicely, though things were a bit hampered by only one of the characters being in mobile shape… and here I ran into the first real rule problem: the rules give no help for deciding how fast a priest can heal someone outside of combat. I decided that the others could get back to decent health pretty fast to keep things moving, but… the rules failed here.

After some stalking around, I decided to call the game session a day – character creation and that one combat had taken a lot of time, and it was getting late. We may continue that scenario later, but for now that’s where we are: halfway in the demo scenario.

So, my opinion of the game after some (quick) playtesting?

• The basic mechanics worked pretty much as well as I had hoped. The dice pool thing rocks.

• I’m still undecided on when and if to use the “Rally Phase” mechanic.

• The “progress tracker” is a nice general mechanics, but the books give way too little actual examples of how to use it. As it, it has promise but needs more game support in order to be really useful.

• Despite my own hopes, the game doesn’t really have a “social combat” mechanic. It has something in that direction, but it’s pretty rough and simplified. Of course, due to the expandable card-based design, this might change in the future. I’m sure something cool could be built on top of the Progress Tracker.

• Yes, it takes a lot of table space, but nothing impossible. The abstract combat movement mechanics means you don’t need a grid or miniatures, so things balance out. Might be a problem with a larger play group and a small table, though – you need decent table space for this thing.

• In the future, I hope they provide NPC/monster stats as cards, also. Here I had to keep a book open for that stuff, which was a bit cumbersome.

• At the moment, the rules have a big gaping hole (or at the least, a massive source of confusion). I’ve talked about this a lot of rpg.net and FFG’s own forums, but for now there is no official answer, you must do some houseruling in order to play this game. The problem is this: the game has Encounter Mode, and Story Mode. Action cards make sense in Encounter Mode, but stop making sense outside it. Nowhere in the rules does it say exactly when to use which mode, and how to handle Actions outside Encounter mode. As priest healing “spells” are Actions too, it results in stuff like zero information on how fast divine healing (outside combat) is. Is it instant (one interpretation of the rules)? Does it take days (another interpretation)? Nobody knows, and there is no official answer yet. Though…

…ok. I won’t go into length on this, but in a nutshell here is my current interpretation: you play most of the game in Encounter Mode. You only use Story Mode for “scene switch” narrations, etc. The important thing is this: the amount of time a “turn” takes in Encounter Mode is highly flexible. During combat it might be some seconds or tens of seconds. Outside of that, it may be minutes, hours or even days. Depends on the context. With this framework, you can sort of make the game work outside “combat-time” mode also, though you must fudge things a bit (allow multiple actions during “turn” even though the rules don’t strictly allow that, etc). The problem is that this interpretation depends completely on GM fiat, and also results in some corner-case problems – but it results in less problems than other interpretations to date. To my mind, at least.

So… be prepared for some house-ruling. At the moment, this is a somewhat weird game… it goes from “exact rules with exact results” to “no rules whatsoever, total GM fiat” with no warning whatsoever. While the nice and visual layout of the game might make it good for newbie GMs, the fact that the rules contain some holes at the moment make it less than ideal for that. It’s nothing that a good GM (even a newbie) can’t deal with, but… you have been warned.

In sum: this is a very good new incarnation of Warhammer Fantasy, with lots of (honestly) innovative bits and lots of promise. It’s a bit unpolished at the moment in places, but I have hopes that FFG and/or the player community can slowly fill in the missing bits. Despite the small problems, I’ll highly recommend this one. It’s a breath of fresh air to an old world, in many respects.