Wild Talents Essential Edition

I have been enjoying Reign so much that I decided to get Wild Talents as well. The book is paperback sized and cost me £7 from Leisure Games which really is a bargain.

So far bits of the book have been good, the One Roll Engine (ORE) seems to be a good fit to the superhero genre but at the same time there are the same problems I felt existed for Godlike. The system is a weird mix of grand heroic superpowers and really detailed and fiddly sub-systems for damage, armour etc. It doesn't really feel coherent.

Song of Ice and Fire

It's a great looking book with a lot of atmosphere and at first reading of the rules I can't help but think that Green Ronin have created their own version of WFRP. The rules are certainly not d20/True 20 derived and the layout of the books is very similar to the books produced for Black Library.

Starblazer Adventures

This book is so big you could kill someone with it. It's actually so big that its daunting to read it. What I have seen so far is that it is very similar to Spirit of the Century, with collective character generation and Stunts hanging off Skills. SotC was a much smaller book so where is this massive bulk coming from?

The reproduced art from the Starblazer comics is very nostalgic though.

Players Handbook 2

It is a bit of a necessary purchase if you have anything in the Dungeon and Dragons 4e line. For a start it restores Druids and Gnomes to the player mix. Interestingly it also seems to introduce the "good" counterparts of all the "evil but cool" races like Drow and Tiefling that were in the first handbook.

Dragon Warriors: Sleeping Gods

I'm slowly making my way through Sleeping Gods the adventure collection for Dragon Warriors. It is really more of a re-reading as I remember a lot of it from the original paperbacks.

All of the adventures are packed with a kind of Arthurian gothic feeling of pagan spirits and ancient ghosts. It is interesting that it mixes a kind of realistic feudalism with really quite high fantasy elements.

It reminds me of how Warhammer should feel.

Dragon Warriors

I have just bought the new Dragon Warriors edition and I was surprised to find that it is actually quite an attractive book. Usually Mongoose books might be charitably described as "fugly".

Then having a look at the credits I see this is actually a product of James Wallis's new publishing company that is being printed and distributed via Mongoose. That would explain it then.

D&D 4e: Surrender or Die!

An unusual situation arose in a game last week. We discovered that the Intimidate skill allows you to make an Intimidate roll to force Bloodied opponents to surrender. This significantly shortened fights and actually made the game more interesting that just stomping over piles of corpses.

I'm not sure if it is meant to be so powerful but I do think it works better than the old Red Box morale rules where the GM had to dice to see if the monsters wanted out. This way the morale collapse of the monsters is actually player initiated unless the GM things the encounter is hopeless for the monsters.