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Stock Art: Blackmon Scene Stable
Publisher: Rogue Genius Games
by Christopher S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 01/23/2017 00:23:19

I do enjoy this piece quite a bit and it doesn't look like there's a lot to pull out of it so it gets 5 stars instead of four. Small nitpik. I'd like to see the psd or AI files if these are photoshop or illustrator. That would be much more useful for a publisher tyring to utilize this art but for just under $2 I can understand them not being available.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Stock Art: Blackmon Scene Stable
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Stock Art: Blackmon Scene Statuary
Publisher: Rogue Genius Games
by Christopher S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 01/23/2017 00:15:32

I really enjoy the art in this series - see any of the Blackmon stuff from Rogue Genius Games - and the price is pretty great too but the art is so specific. If they would of taken the time to put a statue piece by itself in the PDF and the two characters, even from the waist up, it would be a 5 star rating. Even with that it's not too hard to photoshop out the statue or the male character. The female character has part of her obscured by a statue head making it unusable in that way. Great stuff for the price but could be better and more useful to publishers and gamers if there were individual pieces too.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Stock Art: Blackmon Scene Statuary
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Stock Art: Blackmon Scene Portage
Publisher: Rogue Genius Games
by Christopher S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 01/23/2017 00:08:34

This is a really nice piece of art for a Pulp or Fantasy game or product if you're a publisher. You can even cut out the priest looking character in the foreground without too much effort if you're comforatable with photoshop if you're just interested in using that part of the art. I'm a novice and it wasn't that hard. It only gets 4 stars because it would of been nice if that was included in the package since it wasn't all that much more effort.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Stock Art: Blackmon Scene Portage
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The Anime Hack
Publisher: Okumarts Games
by Christopher S. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 01/13/2017 12:19:17

Hey Folks. I've read BESM, other d20 games that try and do anime, and other story games which hit the genre they're aiming at pretty well. All that said the Anime Hack is light, easy to understand, has all the basic building blocks you need if you want to kit bash together your own anime game, and it's affordable. You'll have to do a little work to put together the exact anime game you're looking for but as a place to build up from this games got it right.

If you're not familiar with the X Hack games they have a mechanics where you have resources tied to dice which diminish over time when you use them. In the Anime Hack it uses Stress Veins and Genki which are those moments when character push through a tough situation or unleash a bunch of energy to get the job done. It's a pretty great mechanics to get your One Piece or Super Saiyan moments at the table.

If you’re not an anime fan then I wouldn’t suggest this game for you, but if you are I think it’s a must buy. For $5 you really can’t go wrong.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
The Anime Hack
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Fate Core System
Publisher: Evil Hat Productions, LLC
by Christopher S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/29/2013 10:01:57

The Review Fate Core will help you build the game you want to play as long as the game revolves around characters who are proactive, competent, and dramatic. Every bit of this book is a guide to doing that, from teaching what FATE is in chapter one right down to how to add in all the extra bits like magic, superpowers, or cyberware in chapter eleven. Other games which try to do this don’t always excel at giving or explaining the tools to players and GMs. Fate Core is superb in that regard. The layout is easy to read, important information jumps off the page in bold text or in bullet lists, there are tons of examples throughout the course of the book, and the side bars are punchy and poignant. Oh, did I mention the hyperlinks for you digital readers. The table of contents is hyper-linked and there are hyperlinks in the margins to jump you to places in the book which might help you grok what’s written on the current page. Those margin notes also have page numbers for those with physical copies. This book is just another of the fine products produced by Evil Hat Productions and is the tightest Fate rules set produced to date. I recommend buying it but if you want to know what’s inside here’s a chapter break down of what you get.

Chapter one talks about the basics of Fate. It starts with the obligatory “What is role playing” section before moving on to describe fudge dice, the ladder, Fate Points, Aspects, taking action in the game, invoking, and compels. By covering all these ideas in basic terms the chapter prepares you for the rest of the book.

Chapter two covers game creation. This is a pared down version of the Dresden Files RPG city creation system but it also expands the ideas in that game to assist GMs in getting their groups to collaborate on any type of game they might want to play. It breaks down how to create a setting, set the scale of the game, get the games big issues going, and populating the game with, organizations, locations and NPCs.

Chapter three is all about character creation and how it’s also a game. Fate games use a system which tells part of a characters story and how the character connects with two other characters. From this little storytelling game you get your Aspects, which define half of a Fate character. The other half are skills and stunts. The skills use something called the skill pyramid. Each character gets four skills at +1, three at +2, two at +3, and one at +4. Characters are also capped at +4 or great according to the core rules. There is an optional rule where players start with twenty points to spend but are limited by the cap and the idea of the skill column, which is always in effect. In this version of Fate three stunts are free and refresh can be spent to get up to two more. Next Stress and Consequences are covered which is the way damage is handled. Finishing up some smooth and quick character creation rules are laid out. In short a character starts with a couple of Aspects, some skills, and a bunch of blanks filled in during the first session, adding in what is needed when it is needed. This works really well for people who have some ideas but aren’t sure how the game is going to play out and which skills will be really important.

Chapter four talks about what I believe to be the lynch pin mechanic which makes this game so much fun to play. Aspects and Fate Points. Fate points are the currency of the game and Aspects bring what would normally be background fluff to the forefront of play allowing it to be invoked or compelled. In previous books like The Dresden Files RPG and Spirit of the Century there have been chapters on the Aspect but none as comprehensive and easy to understand as in this book. It starts by defining Aspects and Fate Points, then discusses the type of Aspects: Game, Character, Situation, Consequences, and Boosts. After that we learn what Aspects do, covering how making something an Aspect makes it important to the game and get some advice on determining when the mechanics should be engaged. Next it covers how to make quality Aspects. Here’s my favorite advice: Always ask what matters and why?

If that question is answered an Aspect is easy to make. Following that is invoking Aspects which is the mechanical application of Aspects and hits on something I believe is new to this version of Fate in how free invocations are used. As many free invocations on an Aspect can be made at one time as there are fate points on the Aspect, even spending a fate point from the acting players own pool on top of it. Compelling aspects comes after along with the types of compels. The best part here is the idea of suggesting compels is everyone at the tables responsibility. After this are sections about using Aspects as role playing prompts, how to remove or change Aspects through play, and creating or discovering new Aspects. Finally the chapter talks about the Fate point economy, how refresh works, other ways to spend Fate points other than invoking, and how to earn them. Something new for the GM here is whenever a scene starts you get a Fate point for every PC in that scene. You can spend these Fate points on anything you want in the scene to help get your ideas going and to challenge the players.

Chapter Five explains Skills and Stunts. It starts by defining skills, what they do in the game, and touches on the four basic actions of Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack, and Defend. When a player takes action that requires a dice roll in this game they are always doing one of these four things with some skill. The best rule change from previous versions of the game is the Create an Advantage action. It replaced a bunch of old actions that created Aspects. I was always confused since they were so similar. Stunts are covered next and this section has a fantastic “how to” on building new stunts. In fact anytime this book is giving you the “how to” on anything it is done in superb fashion with the mechanical tools explained clearly, followed up with common examples so you have a blueprint to start with when building anything. Finishing the chapter is the skill list. I think it’s worth noting there is a quality side bar on dealing with the resource skill on pg 123.

Chapter six is all about Actions and Outcomes. This chapter and chapter 7 cover the procedures of play, starting by getting in depth with the four outcomes and the four actions. Everything in this chapter exemplifies the Fantastic layout of the book. It’s easy to read and understand and if a term was forgotten the margin notes point to where to find it.

Chapter seven covers challenges, contests, and conflicts. When a single roll of the dice isn’t enough to determine the outcome these are the procedures given to decide what happens. There are some great questions GMs can ask to decide which of these three frameworks should be used. Challenges cover overcoming some series of obstacles where a single roll doesn’t seem to fit, contests involve two or more characters striving for a goal but aren’t trying to harm each other directly, and conflicts are for those situations where people are trying to hurt each other physically or mentally. The conflict section is the largest of the chapter and covers setting the scene, determining turn order, what exchanges and zones are, creating situation Aspects, resolving attacks, taking consequences, recovering from consequences, ending a conflict and all the other little gritty details of fighting, be it with words or swords. I really like the teamwork rule in this game. It’s simple. If a character has at least an Average rating (or +1) in the skill that the die roller is using a +1 can be added assuming the characters assistance makes sense in the narrative. The only caveat is if a character helps they are now subject to any costs associated with the roll.

Chapter eight is all about running the game from the GMs perspective. It covers what the GMs responsibilities are which is starting and ending scenes, playing the world, judging the use of the rules, and creating scenarios along with just about everything else. So while that’s the over view of what the GMs job is this chapter goes deep, giving GMs some options for how to guide game creation and deciding if extras are needed. Then it hits on how to make the game go during play and it starts with the Golden Rule of Fate:

Decide what you’re trying to accomplish first, then consult the rules to help you do it.

It seems so simple but it’s such good advice for any game. Next it talks about when to roll the dice:

Roll the dice only when succeeding or failing at the action could each contribute something interesting to the game.

Then there’s advice on how to make failure interesting, some excellent tips about how to not marginalize characters because they failed, and what constitutes a minor cost vs. a serious cost. After that the chapter goes into how to push some of the work onto your players, setting difficulties, dealing with game time and story time, and how to use story time in success and failure to create deadline pressures. There’s advice on zooming in and out on the story, judging the use of skills and stunts, why you should leave specific measurements out of the game, dealing with the weird things that happen in conflicts, and how multiple targets of effects could be handled. It covers environmental hazards, gives advice on dealing with Aspects and how not to be weaksause (their words not mine) when making compels. Finally there is an excellent set of guidelines for creating and playing the PCs opposition. This version of Fate, like others adopts a create only what you need philosophy, which I approve of, and covers how to right-size your opposition if you want rougher or easier conflicts based on numbers, skills, advantages, and venues. I think this chapter is a gold mine of advice for any GM running most traditional RPGs and even some which aren’t so traditional.

Chapter nine covers the creation of scenes, sessions, and scenarios. It starts with defining the scenario and how to start building them by finding the problems, asking story questions, establish the opposition, and set the first scene. After that the game should just go. It’s fantastic stuff and helps GMs out by posing a bunch of Madlibs to figure out what problems there are and following it up with questions you can answer to figure out everything else. Next is support for scenes through determining the purpose of the scene and figuring out what interesting thing is going to happen. Then the book takes a few pages to help GMs get their players interested in the scene by advising GMs to hit character Aspects and calling back to the three pillars of the game: Competence, Proactivity, and Drama. Then some superb advice is given.

Whatever you have planned will always be different from what actually occurs.

The chapter finishes with some information on resolving the scenario.

Chapter ten is called the long game which defines and then gives advice for building story arcs and campaigns. They’re basically giving frameworks for spontaneous storytelling. The mechanic that helps signify the ending and beginnings of these arcs are milestones. The book takes some time to define minor, significant, and major milestones and what mechanical benefits each of them give to players. Then advancing the world is covered and the things the GM should think about during each of the milestones. The chapter finishes up with advice about how to handle NPCs over the long haul.

Chapter eleven is all about the Extras. What’s an extra? It’s anything that’s part of a character or controlled by a character that gets special treatment in the rules. These are the setting rules you’ll get in a super hero game or the magic system in a fantasy setting. To help GMs out the book has a bunch of different add-ons you can use or use as a blueprint to build your own extras. To help GMs create those extra’s they even have a great list of questions GMs can ask to help them figure out what they may or may not need. In here is also one of the coolest things about Fate. The Fate fractal. Anything in the game world can be treated like it’s a character. A car, an organization, a location, whatever. Just throw some Aspects, skills, stunts, a stress track or two, and consequence slots on it if you want. You want a Birthright campaign, you can do it, just make all the kingdoms Fate characters with skills, stunts, or Aspects, and that’s just one of the things you could do.

My personal thoughts are this rules set is the tightest Fate has produced yet. Aspects are easier to understand than ever before, there is an interesting failure mechanic where the player gets to choose if they fail or succeed with a consequence, and the game creation sections along with the extra’s chapter gives you the tools to build the game you want. For GMs Chapters eight through ten are some of the best GM advice collected in one place I’ve seen in a RPG book that isn’t Robin’s Laws of Game Mastering. As far as presentation and use of language for explaining a game is concerned I’ve always felt the best book out there was the Mouse Guard RPG. While that book is still more beautiful I feel Fate Core is at least its equal and maybe just a little bit better at teaching the rules through the text and layout. I don’t give ratings but I will say this. I love Dungeon World and I’m very fond of Mouse Guard as a book to teach a rules set. Fate Core accomplishes the goal of teaching the game better than either of those games. I can’t say it’s a better rules set than Dungeon World or Mouse Guard because it’s focus is different but as a set of tools to help GMs and players build a game I’ve never seen a book or game do it better.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Fate Core System
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Numenera
Publisher: Monte Cook Games
by Christopher S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/28/2013 20:23:42

Numenera is Monte Cook Game’s first offering as a company. It’s actually the game that created the company through their highly successful kickstarter. It garnered over five-hundred thousand dollars. The game is set a billion years in Earth future and uses Monte Cooks Cypher System. The ideology of the game is based on the French artist Mobious and the works of Gene Wolfe, especially his The Book of the New Sun. If you’re unfamiliar with those works they mix science fiction and fantasy to provide a images and texts filled with mysticism and technology to create worlds which expand our minds to alternate perceptions as good art does. Numenera takes those ideas and gives us a game and world in which we can explore and tell our own stories in the science-fantasy genre.

The Rules The Cypher System uses a D20 and target numbers like other d20 games but the procedures of the game provide a very different feel when playing. Everything in the game that isn’t a player character is based on a level from one to ten, from hitting a metallic spider who spins webs of razor wire with your blade of projected force to negotiating terms in your favor with the mutant human lord of a city built upon the back of a giant mechanical walking machine that no longer moves. Unlike other d20 games you don’t have modifiers. The characters have skills, assets, and can use effort. The players start leveraging their skills, assets, and may spend effort to reduce the level of the challenge. Depending on the situation the GM may or may not tell the player what the level is. Once the level is set you multiply it by three and that’s the number the player needs to roll equal to or above on a d20 to succeed. That’s most of the game but shifting from static modifiers to getting the players involved in reducing the level changes play into a much more narrative style. But what about the characters?

The characters are comprised of three descriptors, an adjective noun who verbs. This could be a Clever Glaive who Fuses Metal and Flesh or a Tough Jack who Howls at the Moon. Each of these descriptors give you some mechanical benefits in the form of skills, abilities, effort, edge, and points for your pools. The phrase also gives you some cues as to what your character is like in broad stroked. Skills come in two levels. You’re trained or specialized. Trained means you can reduce a challenge down by one level, while specialized reduces the level by two. Your pool is three stats: Might, Speed, and Intellect. These pools comprise your “hit points” and are also a resource to activate abilities and effort. When you take damage it comes off the pool that is appropriate for the attack. When one of your pools hits zero you become When you activate abilities it sometimes has a cost associated with one of your abilities. The Onslaught power of the Nano - a Nanos a noun - costs one intellect. Effort is another place you can spend your pool points. If you’re attempting to do something which requires a roll it falls into one of the three pools categories. You can spend three points from a pool to gain one level of effort which reduces the level of the challenge by one. You can increase your effort when you advance to another tier but at first tier you can only apply effort once per action. Edge is a way to reduce your costs when spending points from you pool. Your Edge is associated with one of your pools. In the case of the Nano and his Onslaught ability they would have an intellect edge of one and could choose to reduce the cost of Onslaught to zero. You can have multiple edges and when you advance tiers you can gain more edge. You can only apply edge once per action.

One of the last things to chat about mechanically is experience points and how they’re used. Experience points in this game are given in two situations. One is you get experience points for discovering new things. That means you don’t get XP for killing things. You get it for finding the Vessel of Imbrilyn that no one has seen in a thousand years that the nasty gorilla looking thing created from a mass of sentient vines is guarding. The other way is through GM Intrusion. I don’t think I would of called it that but it’s function is pretty cool. The GM gets to introduce some complication to the scene and for the players trouble they get an experience point and get to give another player an experience point. You can spend experience points as a resource too. For one XP you can re-roll a d20 roll. Two XP give you a short term benefit like a skill that only applies to a certain area/location or ability that a character has for the duration of a scenario. Three XP gains a long term benefit like an artifact of familiarity. Other long term benefits are generally the result of the evolving story. For four XP you gain a permanent benefit such as Edge, More points for your pools, another level of effort, or a new skill or ability. You have to select each of these options once before you move onto the next tier. This keeps players from getting five effort before they select a second edge or add points to their pool.

A couple of things I didn’t mention. Pools are “Hit Point” if one drops to zero your impaired which makes it harder to do things, two at zero and you’re disabled, three at zero and your dead. The d20 has a little more information on it. If you roll a 1 the GM gets a free GM intrusion and you get more benefits on 17 - 20.

So those are the rules of the game. Together they still have some of that d20 feel with a lot more bent towards narrative play. Players are a little less at the mercy of the dice and they have a lot of choices to make during the course of play in managing their pools, when to spend effort, and if spending XP on re-rolls is really worth when it will keep you from advancing as quickly.

Setting Here are the true things that everyone knows about The Ninth World:

  • At least one was the center of a galactic (or perhaps intergalactic) space-faring empire.
  • At least one wielded the power of planetary engineering and stellar lifting.
  • At least one had knowledge of the fundamental forces of reality and could alter those forces as they wished. The very laws of physics were theirs to play with, like toys.
  • At least one filled the world with invisible, molecule-sized machines called nanites (or nano-machines) that could deconstruct and reconstruct matter and manipulate energy.
  • At least one explored the multi-verse of other dimensions, parallel universes, and alternate levels of reality.
  • At least some of these civilizations were not human.

That is some excellent fodder for just thinking about the world and it’s strait from the book. There are some interesting things going on in the described setting but we’re given some very understandable concepts to go along with the strangeness of Numenera.

In general the people of the Ninth World are very similar to those who lived at around 1000 AD. They just have all this stuff around them which has altered the environment which they barely know how to use and if they can figure it out they adapt it in a way to help make their lives better. Still, they don’t understand how it works, just that it works when they press a button or stick some water in one end. Now that we know a little about the people let’s move onto the big sections of the world which are described.

The Steadfast is nine kingdoms which have all the political intrigue you could want as they wrest for power and land from each other. The Order of Truth and the Aeon Priests manage The Nine, as they are called, as they search for and attempt to study the Numenera which is what anything from the previous worlds are called.

Beyond the Steadfast the world looks a little more like a science fantasy version of the wild west mixed with city-state politics. There are little bastions of civilization and they might turn into larger kingdoms except it’s just a dangerous place out there filled with unexplained phenomena like The Cloud Crystal Skyfields, The Ausren Woods (don’t eat the fruit), The Great Slab, and the Amorphous Fields. They also don’t have the strong presence of the Aeon Priests to help keep things in check.

Then there’s Beyond the Beyond which has the Clock of Kala. Think of a thirty thousand foot mountain range that creates a perfect ring with one way in and out called the Sheer which is just as strange since it’s an artificially created path that cuts through three hundred and twenty miles of the Clock of Kala and is uniformly seventy-three miles across the entire time with smooth walls and ground the entire way.

In all three of these places there are plenty of opportunity for stories to be told and a variety of hooks for adventures to be started but the map of the Ninth World only shows a very small portion of the world leaving a great deal for players and GMs alike to create their own places and tell their own stories using the ideas of Numenera instead of the presented setting details. I felt that was a nice touch.

The last thing I want to mention about the setting are Cyphers. Cyphers are one time use Numenera which the players are supposed to acquire and use often. From pills which allow you a one time teleportation to anti-gravity soles which only work for ten minutes. I think the Cyphers and how they’re supposed to be used in the game are the mechanic which makes the game feel most like Numenera. The rest of the Cypher system and maybe even Cyphers themselves, in the mechanical sense, can be lifted right out of the game and used to play something else.

The Book The book's layout is nice. It’s better in print than PDF. Reason being in the creatures chapter on the first page all of the creatures are listed by level in the left hand column. None of them are hyperlinked. That would of been useful. There are some other spots I would of like to see things hyperlinked but that’s the most glaring one. It’s still a pretty book and well written. I only had to read the rules section once to understand how to play it.

Personal Thoughts I’m a fan of the game. I think it’s a clever design using ideas from d20 games, or f20 games if we’re using Robin Laws nomenclature, and spinning them to create something new. I feel the mechanics of the game could be lifted out to play something else and have heard of people using them to play Cyberpunk and Shadowrun type games. I’ve even thought of a way to run my ongoing fantasy game using the Cypher system. I still don’t think that detracts from the setting material presented. It’s Monte Cook and if nothing else the man knows how to “cook” up a different world. Still, the idea’s are sharp, the ideology is cool, the mechanics are sound and familiar enough that you can get d20/f20 players to play and understand it, and it’s really right in my wheel house of hybrid games mixing traditional and narrative mechanics.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Numenera
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