Tagline: The Trinity Field Reports continue to be one of the best elements of the Trinity line.

Since Dungeons & Dragons first appeared on the market over twenty-five years ago the vast majority of roleplaying games have shared a standard motif in which the roles that the player’s assume are always (and I mean always) individuals who spend 99% of their time together in what is essentially a gang, wandering around, and engaging in thinly rationalized acts of violence. It has been interesting to watch over the past few years as the seemingly inevitable backlash against this ideology has slowly materialized. The backlash, in fact, has almost reached the point where it is fashionable to include it as a disclaimer – even when doing so is patently absurd. (For example Unknown Armies includes the disclaimer that people who “follow this type of logic” usually end up in insane asylums… just before describing a game in which the players take on the role of people who believe that they can perform magic. Violence, I guess, gets you locked up a in a nuthouse. Thinking that you get magical powers through self-mutilation is perfectly normal.)

That being said, it’s not that bad a trend. Even if you aren’t looking to get your games completely bogged down in real world causalities (what fun would a Feng Shui campaign be, for example, if your PCs were always worrying about civil suits?), such things can occasionally be used to add an original twist to an old story. Take the storyline in the Flash comic books a couple years back, for example, in which the Flash is put on trial for failing to save someone from a fire. That’s clever. Or take the brilliancy of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Normally you just quietly ignore the fact that Batman is an unlicensed vigilante; Miller explores the concept (along with others) and creates something fresh and creative. (Costumed superheroes make an excellent example of this because so many realities are quietly put on hold in the genre; bring one or all of those realities back into play and you have a whole new playing field to explore.)

All of which brings us around to Trinity Field Report: Psi Laws. This is a product which probably never would have existed fifteen years ago, because the only question it asks is: If your main characters use their psionic abilities, what are the legal ramifications?

I’ve commented before on the greatness of the Field Report concept. It allows Andrew Bates to deal with concepts, fill holes, and correct sizable mistakes which just couldn’t be handled any other way. These are things which could not be expanded effectively to fill a full-sized sourcebook, but of such a nature that they cannot be incorporated into another product in a convenient matter (or, in one case, something which should have been included in a product but was not – letting them correct the mistake in as clean a manner as possible). Their unique, cheap nature means that the Trinity universe can be fleshed out in ways other universes cannot.

Psi Laws is an excellent example of this. Giving both the GM and the player (due to their format as field reports to Aeon Trinity agents) a general overview of the way psions are treated by laws in all the major areas of the Trinity setting – and, through inference, the way law functions in general two centuries in the future — Psi Laws gives Trinity something no other science fiction setting has: Laws. Most games simply assume (or rather, let you assume) that the laws of their future realities will be, for all intents and purposes, identical to those of 20th century America. It’s an interesting oversight considering that the laws of today are substantially different from the laws of twenty years ago… let alone a hundred or two hundred years ago. Often these future settings have new technologies and new societies, but no conceptual base for how the law has changed over the years. This is a particular oversight in settings where the PCs end up being law enforcers of one variety or another.

Taking all of that into consideration I can give Psi Laws the same high recommendation I’ve given the other Field Guides — this is $5 well spent.

(Psi Laws does contain one serious mistake where a block of text was apparently pasted into the wrong place (it appears in its correct place as well father down the page). I also have reservations about the cover – a blow up of an interior image which is severely pixellated. These are minor concerns, however.)

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Bryant Durrell
Company/Publisher: White Wolf
Cost: $4.95
Page count: 25
ISBN: 1-56504-769-9

Originally Posted: 1999/04/26

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

As I mentioned previously, I wasn’t planning on initiating this sequence of posts until I had the last of the final art in my hands. But my post about running a forum-based adventure over on theRPGSite a couple days ago has inexplicably resulted in two people sending me scathing e-mails demanding how I can possibly justify running online adventures or developing prep notes for Eclipse Phase scenarios when Legends & Labyrinths still hasn’t been published.

Well, it’s largely because there’s nothing for me to do. As I’ve expressed previously, we’re waiting for art. And the reason we’re waiting for art is because paying for that art was the entire point of the funding initiative. It’s frustrating that we’ve had artists flake, but we’ve got some really great artists working on it now and it’s just a matter of time before we’ll be able to realize Legends & Labyrinths as it was intended to be.

So if you’re wondering why I have time to write updates here on the Alexandrian or run games for my friends, it’s because the choice isn’t between “working on L&L” and “doing this other thing”. It’s between “doing this other thing” and “doing nothing”. Because you really don’t want to see what the art for L&L would look like if I was trying to fill the gap in my spare time:

(aww yeah… pay me $40 for a full-glossy hardcover of that, baby)

Notably, none of the excoriating e-mails I have received have been from the people who have actually given me money for Legends & Labyrinth. I appreciate the patience all of them have shown in waiting for the book to come to fruition. And I hope that the art they’ve helped me pay for — and the beautiful book that art will make possible — will be worth the wait for them.

Meanwhile, here’s a concept sketch (not a finished piece!) to give you an idea of why we’re waiting for the professionals to do their thing:

If you’d be interested in playing in a forum-based D&D adventure run by me, you should pop over to Basketweavers vs. The Sunless Citadel on theRPGSite and sign up. It’s first come, first serve. I’m hoping for a frequent updates schedule, so please be prepared to commit at least daily attention to the thread.

Fair warning, though: This is a bit of an odd bird. The run-thru is being motivated by a poster on theRPGSite named Mr. GC who is arguing vociferously that “basketweavers” — i.e., non-optimized characters — cannot play D&D. The opposing contention is that it’s absolutely trivial for non-optimized characters to play D&D, particularly if they’re adventuring in an open sandbox that allows them to select the challenges they want to face at any given moment.

In order to simulate that scenario, we’ll be using a very strange set of character creation guidelines set by Mr. GC for creating a party of “basketweavers” and then assuming that this particular party of “basketweavers” has selected The Sunless Citadel for their next adventure.

The particular version of The Sunless Citadel I’ll be using will be slightly modified from the original. But if you are familiar with the scenario, you may want to sit this one out.

Tagline: Dream Pod 9 has given us a character compendium which is actually worth buying. Is there anything these guys can’t do?

I hate character compendiums.

There’s no getting around it. You give me a book full of non-player characters – who usually have little in common except that they happen to share the same game setting (or worse yet, nothing but a game system) – and you’re looking at a product which just isn’t going to be worth the amount of money I spent on it. NPCs just aren’t interesting enough when they’re all that’s being offered. Nor are they all that valuable a resource – NPCs created by other people are difficult to use effectively in your own game (first because they weren’t designed for your game; secondly because it’s harder to get into the head of a character someone else created). The time and money spent on developing these products could always, I feel, have been put to better use on just about anything except a character compendium.

So in picking up Character Compendium 1 for Heavy Gear I was confident that I had finally found a product released by the Pod which I was going to dislike. There was going to be something oddly satisfying in knowing that these guys were actually capable of making a mistake.

Unfortunately I’ve found that not only can I not dislike the Character Compendium, I also have to admit that it’s a top-notch product that you should definitely buy. I don’t know how they pulled it off, but the Pod has produced a Character Compendium which is actually compelling, fascinating reading. Is there nothing that these guys can’t do?

Actually I have to admit that I do know how they pulled it off, and it’s something that any game line developer who feels himself being consumed by the unquenchable desire to release a character compendium should study in depth to understand the secret. It all stems back to the first principle I always return to when discussing Heavy Gear: The system is one of the best, but the reason to keep coming back for more is the setting.

Anyone who has read my reviews of other Heavy Gear products knows that I consider the world of Terra Nova, where it is set, to be one of the best speculative worlds ever created (and possibly the best, period, for roleplaying games). The success of the Character Compendium can be directly traced back to the fact that Terra Nova is a rich, believable world in which characters truly seem to live and breathe because they are given a backdrop which is as vibrant and diverse as the world we live in today. Because the setting seems to truly live and develop in a believable way it means that Dream Pod 9, when sitting down to develop the Character Compendium was able to not just paint a bunch of thumbnails about particular characters, but to deepen our understanding of their fictional world. The characters in the Compendium are not isolated stereotypes or collections of stats (in several cases they don’t have stats provided at all), they are (first and foremost) characters. That makes all the difference in the world.

Take, for example, the first character in the book: Chief Justice Winston Stark of the CNCS. As part of the multi-page description of Stark we are given his biography, introduced to his politics and his active goals (as well as how he goes about accomplishing them), told about his allies and enemies, and then given a specific, indepth look at how this particular character can be used in various roles in a wide array of different campaign types. We are not just given a character, we are told how the character fits into the world and how the world adapts to the character. As a result the Character Compendium does not exist as a series of disjointed snapshots of little collective interest (like looking at pictures assembled from the family albums of complete strangers), but rather paints a deeper, richer understanding of the Heavy Gear universe. Indeed I would honestly say that without the Character Compendium as part of your collection your understanding of Terra Nova will be shallower. That’s high praise for any product, and one which I’ve never felt a character compendium has even come close to achieving.

The Character Compendium is also unique because it was the first Dream Pod 9 product to include fan-generated material (other products have followed a similar process since then). In designing the book the Pod sent out a call for submissions to the pertinent on-line newsgroups and mailing lists, and the response came pouring in. The thing all of these fan-generated characters have in common is that they are members of small, dynamic groups – such as Douglas Winter’s investigating team or the anthropological group headed by Dr. Langmuir. Once again this design philosophy means that the Heavy Gear Character Compendium is superior to its competition – two plus two equals five, and the sum total of these characters is greater than their singular worth.

Unfortunately the Character Compendium was also the first Dream Pod 9 product to suffer from a lack of proofreading (other products have regrettably made the same mistake since then). Spelling typos seem to be rare, but words are obviously omitted entirely at several points in the text – and in at least one place an editor’s note has made it through to the final product. This is fairly minor stuff and only crops up occasionally (leading me to believe that two or three characters were running late and hence lacked editorial attention), and it’s the only problem in an otherwise entertaining and useful product.

So I’ve given up on thinking that Dream Pod 9 will stumble and fall in their production of character compendiums. Maybe if I take a look at GM screens, the single largest excuse to waste cardboard the world has ever produced. Maybe…

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Philippe R. Boulle and Others
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $22.95
Page Count: 162
ISBN: 1-896776-08-6

Originally Posted: 1999/04/26

My opinion of character compendiums has not improved in the last thirteen years. My theoretical opinion of GM screens, on the other hand, has improved considerably. (In actual practice, most GM screens are still horrid in their execution.)

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

This is a quick little thing I wrote up on Reddit a few days ago. The basic idea is that you’re looking to run a game with 1 DM and 1 or 2 players. Legends & Labyrinths includes a build point system which makes it very easy to build encounters for non-standard group compositions, but very small groups pose some unique challenges. It can also be useful to have some quick conversion guidelines for published adventures.

2 PLAYERS

So if you’re looking to DM for a group of 2 PCs:

(1) One of the PCs should be a cleric.

(2) Give them plentiful healing resources. At 1st level, a wand of cure light wounds with 15-20 charges should do it.

(3) Take any adventure designed for 1st level characters and do the following: For any encounter involving multiple creatures, halve their hit points and reduce their number by half. For any encounter involving a single creature, reduce them to minimum hit points.

And that’s it. You’re good to go.

For example, consider the encounters found in the first dozen keyed areas of The Sunless Citadel:

Area 1: 3 dire rats (5 hp) = 1 dire rat (3 hp)
Area 3: 1 dire rat (5 hp) = 1 dire rat (2 hp)
Area 5: 3 skeletons (6 hp) = 1 skeleton (3 hp)
Area 6: 1 dire rat (6 hp) = 1 dire rat (2 hp)
Area 10: 1 quasit (9 hp) = 1 quasit (3 hp)
Area 12: 1 dragonpriest (42 hp) = 1 dragonpriest (21 hp)

The reason this works is because encounters are designed for 4 PCs: If you halve the number of PCs it means that monsters will generally live twice as long and have only half as many targets to inflict damage on. That means that the difficulty of an encounter roughly quadruples if you halve the the number of PCs. So we adjust for that by halving the monster’s hit points (so that they survive half as long) and halving their numbers (which halves the number of actions the monsters can take each turn).

1 PLAYER

Adjusting for having only one player in D&D is a little tougher because there’s no margin for error: If a PC gets knocked unconscious in normal play, they can be revived by other members of the party. If a solo PC gets knocked unconscious, it’s an immediate game over.

Here’s what I recommend: Start the PC at 3rd level and then run them through 1st level adventures that have been adjusted as per the above. (You’ll probably want to have them use a cleric again. Or find some other way to make sure they have access to magical healing.)

I have done very little one-on-one stuff, but this method seems to work.