Tagline: With Atlas acquiring the rights to Feng Shui let’s take a look at one of the old-school supplements.

As this review is being written I have just received news that Atlas Games has acquired the rights to the core Feng Shui rulebook, virtually guaranteeing a re-release of one of the best RPGs ever created. I thought I’d review a couple of old sourcebooks for the game (this one and also Back for Seconds) as a form of mild celebration. Although Atlas hasn’t negotiated the rights to these supplements, I figured what the hell. You should be able to find some of these in a used box somewhere.

Marked for Death is a collection of five adventures for the Feng Shui game – one written by each of the authors. It’s a pretty impressive credit list, with some of the really great creators in this industry taking part – demonstrating that the pure action-packed fun of this game attracted the best of the best. The results don’t disappoint, although it’s always been difficult to get really excited about a set of disjointed adventures. In a lot of ways I feel like I’ve picked up a themed issue of Dungeon magazine instead of a supplement.

As always this review is prefaced by the notice that these are a set of modules. The plots will be discussed as part of the reviews and players should avoid reading this review if they feel that their GM might end up using any of these in the course of their game.

In any case these adventures are really quite excellent. They are also well-balanced, taking advantage of almost all the available facets of the Feng Shui mythos to one degree or another and ranging in complexity from basic introductory to exceptionally complicated.

The first adventured, “Brinks”, written by Bruce Baugh, gets the PCs involved in a bank robbery which is really just a cover for the seizure of a highly potent feng shui site. Very basic, very simple, very good.

In “Blood for the Master”, by Greg Stolze, the PCs are drawn into one of the great staples of HK action flicks – a gang trying to terrorize a neighborhood into submission. The twist? The gang is terrorizing the neighborhood because a demonic temple is about to materialize. The PCs’ mission? Kick demon butt.

“Pai Lai”, by Chris Pramas, takes the PCs into Feng Shui’s future where they are asked to help free a site from Buro control. Unfortunately they get screwed over (welcome to Feng Shui) and a Jammer tries to doublecross them and destroy the site. Oh, did I mention the ancient demon lord that gets freed? Well, there’s this ancient demon lord….

John Tynes really shows off in “The Shape of Guilt”, weaving a complicated political tale in the Netherworld. Tynes describes it as “Hamlet meets The Heroic Trio” – and that’s not the half of it. I’d tell you more, but I don’t want to spoil the fun; plus trying to untangle this twisted web is practically impossible without overwhelming this review. You’ll like it. Trust me.

Finally Allen Varney takes on the challenge presented by “The Shape of Guilt” and succeeds in crafting an even better story with “Shaolin Heartbreak”. This expertly crafted adventure may be a little bit difficult to work into a campaign, but if you take the time and effort to do so you won’t be disappointed. The basic summary: A monk from 1850 travels into the present to save the warrior woman he loves (naturally against the taboos of his religion) from an evil magician. Natually (this is a Hong Kong action flick after all) this warrior woman is a dead ringer for a celebrity that the PCs have become involved with. Fun and mayhem result.

This book is a fun read even if you don’t get the chance to play through the adventures. It’s relatively cheap and I don’t think you can go wrong by taking a look at it.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Writers: Bruce A. Baugh, Chris Pramas, Greg Stolze, John Tynes, and Allen Varney
Publisher: Daedalus Entertainment, Inc.
Price: $12.95
Page Count: 78
ISBN: 1-888335-01-7

Originally Posted: 1999/04/13

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Tagline: This is the book which accompanies quite a few games – the odds and ends which got excised from the primary rulebook, padded out with a handful of NPCs.

In the few short years since its creation and demise at the hands of poor business acumen Feng Shui has established itself as one of the classics of the industry. Unfortunately it was marred by a mixed bag of supplements – some were very good, but others were drawn from the bottom of barrel. Back for Seconds is, in my opinion, the worst of the lot.

To understand the atrocity which this product is you have to understand from whence it was conceived: First, when Robin D. Laws finished the core rulebook some of the material he produced had to be excised due to space considerations – the in-depth description of Operation Killdeer and also several of the character creation Types. Second, the setting for Feng Shui was loosely based on the elements found in the collectible card game Shadowfist – included in the Shadowfist game were several cards detailing specific characters and some cards detailing feng shui sites.

Welcome to Back for Seconds, a bastard child of supplement creation. With a foundational structure of the dozen pages or so of Laws material which didn’t make the final cut of the rulebook, Jose Garcia (the “executive producer” of the Feng Shui line of products) hired a hodgepodge of creators to write out the characters and locations from the Shadowfist cardgame. John Tynes (the product’s “developer”) describes the result best in his introduction as “Central Casting” – but I can’t say I’m impressed with the results.

(None of this, by the way, should be taken as a condemnation of the creative personnel involved in this project.—with names like Bruce Baugh, Greg Stolze, and John Tynes working on it there’s no way you could sanely say this was true. But the product was conceived as a hodgepodge and the result is precisely that: A hodgepodge of questionable usefulness.)

Insofar as it is a hodgepodge, Back for the Seconds is probably the best product of this variety I have yet encountered. The NPCs are generally engaging and interesting (even if they are largely based on one sentence “catch-phrases” from the Shadowfist cards). The types which were cut from the main rulebook provide valuable options to the character creation system. The locations are interesting, if of limited versatility. But the overall product can’t overcome the basic flaw of its conceptual base. It simply fails, in my opinion, to be a valuable sourcebook. About the only thing which would make this worth your money would be the Robin D. Laws material (which is why this receives a 3 and not a 2 rating in substance), otherwise you’d be just as well off spending your money on renting a few Hong Kong action flicks and ripping them off. You’d have more fun.

Style: 3
Substance: 3

Writers: Bruce Baugh, Dave van Domelen, David Eber, Jose Garcia, Steven Kenson, Bob Kruger, Robin D. Laws, Andy Lucas, John Tynes, Greg Stolze
Publisher: Daedalus Entertainment, Inc.
Price: $14.00
Page Count: 78
ISBN: 1-888335-02-5

Originally Posted: 1999/04/13

Feng Shui was one of two games that got me back into roleplaying games. In the mid-’90s I had drifted away from roleplaying games: I had lost my regular groups, other interests were beginning to consume my time, and I had also lost easy access to the online communities that had seen me through previous dry spells. But in the summer of ’97, I was living in Mankato, MN with my dad.

About midway through the summer, I read a blurb in the Comic Buyer’s Guide talking about TSR, Inc. being essentially bankrupt… Wait. What?!  (I guess that explains why I haven’t seen an issue of Dragon Magazine in months.) In an effort to figure out what was going on, I ended up figuring out how I could access some of my old haunts on Usenet and Fidonet. The result was that I got plugged back into gaming news.

I don’t remember now whether it was Feng Shui or Heavy Gear that intrigued me enough that I looked up a local hobby store and biked across town to check it out. This little hobby store only had 3 shelves of incredibly unorganized RPG material, but by some miracle they had these games: One I had come looking for; the other captivated me. I ended up buying both and spent most of the rest of the summer biking back for more.

(And it was an incredibly exhausting bike trip: Mankato is built around and over a cliff facing a river. My dad’s apartment building was located, almost improbably, halfway up this cliff: So no matter where I went, I was either biking up the cliff to get there or up the cliff to get home.)

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.