This is a fun little dice game I recently re-discovered in one of my desk drawers. I picked it up a couple of years back, so its probably still kicking around. It actually predates the collectible dice games (such as Dragon Dice) which followed in the wake of Magic the Gathering, and instead descends from older traditions.

Cosmic Wimpout comes in a small plastic tube containing five dice, a sheet of instructions, and a “Cosmic Wimpout” sticker. Four of the dice are white and the fifth is black. The four white dice are printed with a 5, a 10, and four symbols. The black die comes repeats the 5 and the four symbols, but replaces the 10 with the “Flaming Sun” symbol.

At the beginning of the game you decide on the game goal (usually 300 or 500 points) and the first player roles the dice.

Three matching faces (on the same throw) are known as a flash, and score various numbers of points depending which symbols or numerals you’ve matched up. Five matching faces (at any time) is known as a Freight Train and, naturally, scores far more points. Unless you roll five 10’s, in which case you’ve scored Too Many Points (a Supernova) and you automatically lose the game. (There’s also a Freight Train combination which automatically wins the game.)

The Flaming Sun is a wild card. The Flaming Sun Rules states that you must use the Flaming Sun to complete a flash if it is at all possible.

A “5” or a “10” by itself scores 5 or 10 points (respectively). A Flaming Sun can also be used to simulate these, unless (of course) the Flaming Sun Rule is in effect.

If you don’t score any points on a role that’s a Wimpout. Your turn is over and you’ve lost all the points accumulated in that turn. Wimping out with all five dice is called a Train Wreck. Unless you Wimpout you can continue rolling any non-scoring dice.

You can stop rolling at any time, scoring the points you’ve accumulated, unless:

1. You haven’t rolled yet.

2. You May Not Want To But You Must — if you’ve scored with all five dice you must roll all five dice again before stopping (risking a Train Wreck).

3. The Futtless Rule states that all flashes have to be cleared – meaning that if you’ve just scored a flash you must score additional points by rolling the non-scoring cubes. The Reroll Clause states that you cannot clear a flash while matching any one of the flash faces when clearing. (So if you roll three fives you’d flash; at which point you’d have to reroll the remaining dice and score additional points… but if one of the dice comes up a five you’d have to roll all the remaining dice again.)

Finally, once a player has reached the game goal everybody else gets one last chance to catch up and surpass their score.

It’s a fun little game. It fits easily in a lapel pocket I’ve found and is easy to teach to your friends quickly. Any number of people can play and it’s appropriate for just about any social gathering.

I don’t know how available this game is any more, so I’m going to include the address found on the instruction sheet:

Cosmic Wimpout
P.O. Box 3199
Greenfield, MA 03012

That’s current as of 1993 – which is, of course, an eternity in this industry. I hope you have luck finding it.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Company/Publisher: C3, Inc.
Cost: $4.95
Page count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 1999/05/28

In the years since this review appeared, Cosmic Wimpout has appeared on the web!  You can find it here. Apparently the game has been around since the 1970’s.

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

I remember a time when dice were far more important than they are today. It used to be that a “true gamer” attempted to find as many different types of dice as he possibly could. You started your collection by getting the essentials – the d4, the d6, the d8, the d10, the d12, and the d20. You usually got these in the boxed set along with your rulebook. These were generally cheap. You’d later upgrade these cheapies so that you had marbled or gem dice. Then you’d begin to add on the more exotic types. My first exotic die was the fabled d100… which, if you rolled it in 1988, would probably still be going if it hadn’t gone off the end of the table and hit the wall. My second was a purple d30. I once knew a guy who had a d12 printed with the digits 1-6 and 95-00. I never did figure out what the hell that thing was for. But it was cool.

Of course, then again, perhaps it’s only in my circle of gaming friends that this slow deemphasization has taken place. Perhaps other groups are still possessed of massive dice infatuations. Perhaps. I think it far more likely that the maddened collectors in this industry have all turned to CCGs for their fix. Certainly roleplaying games themselves seem to have retreated to a “single type of die” philosophy over the past decade. It’s no longer common to see a discussion of the differences between d6s, d4s, d8s, d10s, d12s, and d20s comfortably squeezed in between “An Example of Play” and “What is a Roleplaying Game?” in the first section of your rulebook.

All of this palpable nostalgia I have summoned up is only for the purpose of explaining where this “product of time” came from. DeathDice from Flying Buffalo, Inc. is a plastic tube of five six-sided dice – three of which have one side printed with a skull, two of which have one side printed with Grimtooth’s head (Grimtooth, of course, being their semi-cute trollish creature made famous by the Grimtooth Traps volumes… which, of course, you youngsters probably don’t know either… sigh…). The small sheet which comes with the dice is printed with advertisements for other Flying Buffalo products on one side and the rules for a simple dice game called Skulls on the other (which only requires two skull dice – no rules are given which explain why you’d need three… let alone two Grimtooth dice). The rules for Skulls basically consist of rolling the dice over and over again until you either decide to  stop or roll a Skull on one of the dice (which causes you to lose all your points for that round).

The skull prints on the dice are blurry and don’t seem to be based on particularly good drawings to begin with. On the other hand, Grimtooth looks as handsome as ever.

I can’t recommend this product to you… unless of course you’re looking for some truly unique dice to add to your collection. (And don’t deny it: You’ve still got it, even if you don’t use it all that much any more.)

Style: 3
Substance: 2

Company/Publisher: Flying Buffalo, Inc.
Cost: $4.50
Page count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 1999/05/28

About a year after I wrote this review, I had a backpack stolen which contained my entire collection of WEG Star Wars sourcebooks and my dice bag. I had built the collection of Star Wars supplements up because I was playing in a really great Star Wars campaign run by my friend Dave Blackmer. In the years since then, I’ve only replaced the core rulebooks.

My collection of dice, on the other hand, had been built up from the very first day I bought the BECMI Basic Set. It included the dice that came with the Basic Set (including a truly ugly pink-and-black d12), but it also included a complete set of waxed dice from the original Basic Set, the d100 and d30 talked about in this review, and countless others that represented an eclectic adolescence of gaming. And the dice bag was actually one that I had inherited from father. It was literally irreplaceable.

These days I own a lot of dice, but I don’t collect them: I own several varied sets, but they’ve all been purchased for explicitly utilitarian purposes. The exceptions are a hodge-podge of d10s which I received as a donation from my brother-in-law and a set of three d6’s which were wedding favors at my brother’s wedding. (I keep those in my bag to breed good luck… which is ironic, because my dice are frequently being used to kill the characters of my brother and sister-in-law.)

On a similar note, one last dice-related anecdote: The first dice I bought to replace my stolen dice bag was a set of black dice with red numbers. To supplement this set, I purchased additional, matching d6’s (’cause D6 Star Wars). Within only a few weeks of purchase, one of these d6’s shattered in my dice bag — leaving one big chunk and a number of shards. I still keep this entire d6 (in pieces) in my dice bag to soak up all the bad luck.

I may not be a collector, but I wouldn’t be a gamer if I didn’t have dice superstitions, right?

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

Tagline: Dream Pod 9’s chance to celebrate their mascot, with spectacular results.

If you’ve read any of the reviews of the Heavy Gear game you’ve probably heard a familiar theme: Sure, there are mecha… but the game isn’t about the gears. The reason you’ve heard this is because, well, it’s true. The gears are definitely cool, and they’re definitely the most realistic mecha you’ll probably ever encounter, and they are definitely eye candy without par. All that being said, however, the game is really about characters. The Gears aren’t even the “Gods of the Battlefield” the way mecha are usually portrayed. As a result, the sourcebooks tend to deal with the gears in a fairly secondary matter, focusing instead on generalized world-building. Even the vehicle compendiums offer a generalized mix.

Welcome, then, to The Duelist’s Handbook, Dream Pod 9’s chance to celebrate their mascot. And what a celebration it is.

The other heritage which The Duelist’s Handbook inherits is that of the defunct Heavy Gear Fighter card game. HGF was the first Heavy Gear product released by Dream Pod 9 and introduced the dueling concept. As Phil Boulle details in his Behind the Scenes for the book, Into the Badlands allowed the concept of dueling to be expanded from affairs of inter-regimental into the underground, competitive dueling of Khayr ad-Din. The Duelist’s Handbook, as a result of this heritage, details the ritualized rules of Gear dueling; provides a look at the stars of the dueling world; examines the lives and duties of military duelists; provides a host of new weapons and options for Gears; and, finally, serves as a sourcebook for the city of Khayr ad-Din.

Normally I wouldn’t like a book like this. Typically when a roleplaying sourcebook is primarily a technical one (i.e. the title of the book includes the technical term “duelist” rather than a location name like “Khayr ad-Din”) and then includes a setting of some sort, that setting is usually merely tacked on. It is almost never given the justice it deserved, if it deserved any justice at all (more often than not such settings are a poorly conceived set of stereotypes which apparently exists only to highlight elements found in the technical section of the book).

Would it really surprise you if I told you that Dream Pod 9 avoided falling into that trap? First off, the technical aspects of the book are handled with grace and style. Military dueling, competitive dueling, and the worlds which surround both are described in great detail. Additional weapons, gears, and detailed rules for small scale tactical combat are given. Second, the setting of Khayr ad-Din (a shadowy city built in an around a massive dumping ground) is detailed with typical craft and style of Dream Pod 9, with an eye always pointed towards providing not only a living, breathing, believable setting of incredible depth, but also a setting which provides countless adventuring possibilities. Plus there is nothing “throwaway” about Khayr ad-Din or its duelers (as anyone who has perused the latest offerings of the storyline books knows).

Beyond the quality of the material itself, Dream Pod 9 continue to demonstrate their enormous talent at putting a book together to make it not only practical, but beautiful. The Duelist’s Handbook was one of the transition products where the Pod slowly developed their lay-out skills from the earlier works which were possessed of a slight “page crowding” sensation (although still exceptional by the standards of the industry) into a cleaner feel. Again, one of those differences between being “one of the best” and “true excellence” which the Pod has demonstrated mastery of time and again. The information is always grouped in an intuitive manner and the index is detailed in all the right places. Typically, the Pod demonstrates that they are capable of “throwing away” artwork which other companies would gladly use on their front covers.

Although the Pod is apparently letting this one slip out of print for at least the moment, you should still be able to find it in stock somewhere. Grab it up, you’d be missing out on a good thing if you let this one pass you by.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Philippe R. Boulle
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $19.95
Page Count: 128
ISBN: 1-896776-07-8

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.

Tagline: Into the Badlands was one of the first Heavy Gear supplements. It set the pace of excellence which we’ve come to expect from Dream Pod 9.

There comes a point in reviewing Dream Pod 9’s work, I’ve realized, that you begin to run out of ways to say, “This is really great stuff.” After you’ve run through the synonyms of great, brilliant, sublime, creative, innovative, and brilliant (did I say that already?) you begin to worry that people will think of you as nothing but a broken record. I can almost hear your thoughts as you sit there reading through one review after another thinking, “This man has been bought off by Dream Pod 9. Nobody can be that good every single time.”

Ah, but apparently they can.

Let me say it simply one more time: Dream Pod 9 is great. Heavy Gear is great. If you aren’t buying these books you’re missing out on a great thing.

To explain just how great these books are, let’s time travel back to the summer of 1997 and take a look around. In 1997 I’d been into roleplaying games for nearly a decade. Despite the fact that I still loved the games dearly and checked in on the Usenet newsgroups from time to time I hadn’t bought more than one or two roleplaying products in over two years. Nothing in the industry was really getting under my skin the way it used to and my interest was slowly waning.

In the summer of 1997 – nearly two years ago now as I write this – all of that changed. Despite having withdrawn my cash into other areas I had become aware of various titles over the years that had interested me to one degree or another: Feng Shui, CORPS, Theatrix… and Heavy Gear. None of them had caught me interest enough, however, to actually take the time to go out and buy them until one day I happened to spot the first edition of the Heavy Gear Rulebook on the shelf of the local hobby store. The cover, with its gear in extreme close-up, drew me in and the professional lay-out and clarity of the interior sold me. I bought the book there and then.

Over the next few days I devoured it in my free time. By the time I was finished I had become impassioned by roleplaying once again. I travelled back to the hobby store, but they didn’t stock any other Heavy Gear products at the time, so I picked up Feng Shui instead.

Heavy Gear brought me back to roleplaying, and its kept me here ever since. That’s how good it is.

All of which, in a rather roundabout manner, brings us to Into the Badlands — the latest Heavy Gear product I happened to read after running out of ways to say “buy this game dammit!”.

Into the Badlands is the sourcebook covering, as the name suggests, the Badlands: the broad equatorial deserts of Terra Nova. The Badlands are an excellent example of how Dream Pod 9’s ability to incorporate uncommon depth into their products gives the GM a broad palette and selection of tools in creating his adventures. Broadly speaking the Badlands are a mix of the American Wild West and the Middle East. If another company were handling this material it is easy to see how the Badlands would quickly be reduced to this common denominator. There would be a number of different cities, but at heart they would all be mere variations upon this simple theme.

Into the Badlands, on the other hand, takes the simple theme and (rather than simply varying it) begins creating whole new themes which are supported by the basic theme, but also subtly supplement it. Hence you get the frontier qualities of the desert oasis towers, you get the corporate politics of Peace River, you get the militaristic refugee community of Port Arthur, you get the visionary unity of Jan Mayen, you get the religious fervor of Massada, you get rover gangs and dueling circuits and smuggling cartels and gambling communities and polar influence and cold war and… well, you get a lot. Plus you get all the fringe areas where those different cultures come into contact and conflict with each other. All of which is supplemented by a plentiful amount of information about how life is actually lived on a day-to-day basis. (Ever sit down after reading a wonderful setting and realize that you have no idea how to actually get inside the mind of a character living in that setting because everything was dealt with at a macro-level? You’ll never have that problem with Terra Nova.) Tack on a couple of chapters on practical adventuring advice – including a dozen adventure seeds, some NPCs and archetypes, and a look at the creatures who make the Badlands their home – and you’ve got a well-rounded sourcebook.

About the only bad thing about the book is the lack of an index, but I could wax rhapsodic for a while longer about many things (like the way that they manage to cover everything you’d expect in a regional sourcebook, plus about twice as much that you wouldn’t – particularly in a book this size), but I won’t because it would be largely repetitious of my other recent reviews of Heavy Gear products. Buy the book.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Philippe R. Boulle
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $18.95
Page Count: 108
ISBN: 1-896776-02-7

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.

Tagline: Crisis of Faith was a masterpiece. Blood on the Wind is better.

The simple summary of content: The world goes to hell and Dream Pod 9 takes you along for the ride.

The short summary of quality: Dream Pod 9 just keeps making great things even better. Don’t let them get their hands on chocolate – they might turn it into an addictive narcotic.

The big concept: Crisis of Faith was a masterpiece. Blood on the Wind is better.

Within the last week I have found the time to plunge once more into the wonderful Heavy Gear game setting after a long absence compounded by “real life”. To ease myself back into things I took a look at the eye candy which is Making of a Universe. Then I devoured the second edition of Life on Terra Nova (a book which has sat, neglected, on my shelf for far too long). Then I took the time to re-read Crisis of Faith. Pausing briefly to write reviews of each of these products (all of which can be found elsewhere on RPGNet) I picked up Blood on the Wind, the second storyline book and one which has been taunting me for over a month now.

I thought Crisis of Faith was a pinnacle of excellence. Much to my surprise I discovered that Blood on the Wind had not only built upon that success, but improved upon it.

First, what has remained the same. The story is still told through the collected notes and data of Nicosa Renault – a master spy who has “retired”, but remains interested in understanding why things happen on Terra Nova. As a result you get to hear the story of Terra Nova told through the thoughts, conversations, video logs, and journals of Terranovans – all gathered by another Terranovan who has an actual personality (and is not merely an excuse for Dream Pod 9 to gather up a bunch of useful stuff).

The product still tells a meta-story of immense proportion, power, and potential – taking full advantage of the roleplaying medium (see my review of Crisis of Faith for a fuller discussion of this). It accompanies this with a visually stunning presentation which demonstrates, once again, that Dream Pod 9 knows how to put a book together. (There aren’t quite as many images as in Crisis of Faith, but if quantity is all you’re interested in your still going to find more here than anywhere else you might care to look.)

So, what’s different? The smaller format of Crisis of Faith has been abandoned in favor of an 8.5 x 11 format (although it is turned on its side, so to speak, from your typical roleplaying supplement). Additionally, an appendix has been added including a detailed timeline of events and a “Who’s Who on Terra Nova” – both valuable resources for any roleplaying or tactical campaign (moreso the former than latter, but that’s to be expected). Also, the color sections found in Crisis of Faith have been abandoned in Blood on the Wind — probably due to cost considerations. I am sorry at their loss, but can understand that the Pod People simply had no choice in light of the negative market performance of Crisis of Faith due to its format. Finally, the layout and organization of this product is clearer than in Crisis of Faith. It’s a subtle improvement. If Blood on the Wind had never existed you’d never have known that anything was “wrong” with Crisis of Faith, because its really just a matter of degree in quality – not a “have and have not” situation.

I could go on at length about the wonders of this product, but I would largely be reduced to either repeating what I said in my review of Crisis of Faith and providing spoilers of the material found within. I choose to do neither.

So you’re wondering if you’ve understood me correctly: Crisis of Faith was one of the best products ever produced in the roleplaying industry. Blood on the Wind took every one of those strengths, eliminated the two small problems which might mar it in the opinion of some, and the only drawback is that I lost the full-color sections of the book? Plus I get more material? Plus it’s cheaper?

Yes, that’s right.

Plus if you thought the last six pages of Crisis of Faith were mind-blowing, wait ‘til you check out the first two pages of Blood on the Wind. Those are big. Then you get to the last four pages of the storyline book proper…. Welcome to a whole new level.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Philippe R. Boulle
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $17.95
Page Count: 80
ISBN: 1-896776-27-2

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.