The New Flesh

Finally you get to play the metal men with really huge shoulders! This is a really hefty book and it opens with one of the better descriptions of the game universe I've seen. However I lost interest very quickly and started skimming through to see how they had solved the problems with the military genre. Although it is still early days it does seem that there are some interesting ideas by focussing on the preparation and execution of missions. Rather than finding your own way through the game you are telling a story through very defined and narrow windows into the world. This worked just fine for Dawn of War 2 (although the pacing was often off) but it is going to be important to see what the mechanics for the relationships and interactions between the PCs are.

I've been skimming through the new Dark Sun books and the overall impression is underwhelming. The main problem seems to be this formula that new D&D books take. They are so busy sticking to the format of the new game they forget to tell you what you should be interested in this background and what makes is compelling as a gaming situation.

This new indie is a small but beautiful book illustrated with colour photographs from NASA's missions to Mars. The game is a bit unusual, designed for two players. One of the player takes the role of someone sent to resolve the problems at the Mars Colony and the other effectively seems to play the GM. One thing I found interesting about the book is that this would have been a seen as a scenario once. The addition of a specific rules system for the scenario doesn't really change that either.

This is an old-school adventure which starts with a good old railroad introduction. It's an interesting twist on the Dragon Warriors grim medieval feel with a bit of Roman pre-history and Viking present. The central idea of the PCs finding a dissolute prince among their adventuring companions is sound but the format of floorplan and encounter key now seems impossibly tired.

It's hard science but it is also FATE! What's going on? Surely as a FATE book this should be massive book not a slim attractive hardback book? Diaspora is a book that is actually designed to be a book, not a magazine. It also has a powerfully stripped back FATE system that seems to retain the key ideas of the system and only expand it to include ideas key to implementing the genre.

The previous adventure path in Pathfinder left me a bit cold, despite loving the Arabian theme. I was feeling that the adventures were becoming quite rote with the inevitable escalation to the demons and devils that made up the end of adventure opponents. This one is quite different, there's already been a scenario based around a play and I'm enjoying the current issue which involves a sealed Pathfinder lodge, vampires, assassin priestesses and pit fighting with summoned monsters.

I bought this one by mistake, thinking it was the main rulebook. It's actually a collection of articles and expansion rules that are the result of a writing competition. It's nicely presented but that's all I can say about it for now.

Another nice book in the Pathfinder line, an old-school style Monster Compendium. What is interesting is that it seems a lot more readable and enjoyable than the ultra-slick 4e books. I think the secret is that this is a genuine bestiary full of a variety of monsters and creatures including D&D classics and fantasy staples. It also includes some of Paizo's Lovecraft crossover creatures which are nice additions.

It's a hefty slab of book that came from Amazon, however like Dark Heresy it seems to be fairly comprehensive. If you've suffered sticker shock from the price then it is worth noting that it seems to be the lavish production values that We've given character and ship generation a go and had a tremendous amount of fun. It's a whole different scale to Dark Heresy, the PCs are very much among the Imperial Elite, able to travel freely, purchase planets and generally have a good time. One thing I think is immediately important is that you have to create some reasoning during character generation as to why the characters have not stopped and are just enjoying the fruits of their endeavours.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I picked up the Pathfinder playtest at GenCon UK and I have found it quite intriguing. I actually quite liked D&D 3e and while I respect the 4e design a lot, the baby went out with the bathwater for a lot of play styles. Having seen a lot of the new ideas in 4e though it is quite hard to go back to 3e and I hope that Pathfinder is going to square the circle here by having a more flexible, less combat-orientated and prescriptive games system while fixing flaws. What kind of things do I mean? Well the rest tendency, dead levels and avoiding classes with too many one shot powers. I'm reading through at the moment but it is difficult because so much of it familiar I keep tending to skip read.

Finally read through Albion's Ransom and was disappointed to find that a decent police procedural runs out of steam and has no real conclusion. It almost says "Find out what happens in Part Two!". It is also too full of the author giving us personal details, I don't care whether he's a pagan or not. I don't need to know credentials to know that the detail of the pagan rituals and ornaments is far too trainspottery and the history is through the lens of fantasy. The scenario is strongest when dealing with the trivia of a missing person investigation and actually I want to play that part of the game. Everything else is just tired and totally within the comfort zone of any White Wolf scenario published in the last decade.

Finishing Solipsists has made me want to read all the other indie games I have piled up in the unread section. The first one to grab my attention is Bliss Stage . It's a pretty unusual premise, an alien invasion sends all adults to sleep and then their robot servants invade the earth through dreams and begin a warm of extermination. PCs are a ragtag group of children struggling to survive the apocalypse and strike back via stolen alien technology. I kind of like the way the players construct the premise of the game (something we've been doing with Burning Islands ) and setting up how they exist as a group and how they have managed to strike back at the invaders. At the moment the interjections from the personas are not working for me. For example there is one interjection that the Bliss GM is there to bring about consensus not to rule things in and out of bounds. It's a good point but it is one worth making explictly.

I'm having a look at the Quickstart rules that were being given out round about free RPG day. I was thinking of buying a copy but I am now starting to think again as I can't help but think that the investigation stuff is handled a lot better in the Gumshoe system games.