Tagline: Ghost Dancers details the Indian societies and tribal beliefs of the Weird West. An above-average supplement, it is highly recommended for any GM running a Deadlands game and will prove useful to anyone playing an Indian character.

If I recall correctly, Ghost Dancers was the first time I received a review copy of a book. (At the time, RPGNet maintained a Wish List function for people who had posted reviews on the site. They probably still do. Here’s a document somewhat contemporary to this review describing their review policy.) Getting that review copy was terribly exciting for me at the time. I kept meaning to go back and write a review of the core Deadlands game, but for one reason and another it never happened. The half-finished file still lurks on my hard drive as a poor derelict.

Ghost Dancers is the sourcebook for the Indians of the Weird West. It does it’s job well – giving a highly effective overview of Indian political, cultural, and religious life. Those of you familiar with the Deadlands game will know that many of the crucial events which lead to the development of the Weird West (instead of our historical Wild West) are the result of various Indian factions – as a result this book is a crucial key to understanding some of the background to the world itself. Since it also details the Hunting Grounds in great detail, this book is a must for any Deadlands GM.

I also suggest, but not quite so highly, this book for any player with an Indian character who feels that the main rulebook isn’t giving him enough flavor or options for his character. If you are generally unfamiliar with Indian belief and culture, this book will also give you a good one-point stopping place for learning more. (Of course you should beware of taking things in this book as absolute historical fact – the designer himself is careful to point out that not only is the book simplifying many things about Indian culture, the Weird West is not an historical place by any stretch of the imagination.)

The book follows the traditional (and extremely advantageous) breakdown of all Deadlands material: a section for the players (Posse Territory), material that the GM should know and reveal only to select players (No Man’s Land), and material for the GM’s eyes only (Marshal’s Handbook). In Ghost Dancers, however, this has been changed to The War Party, Sacred Grounds, and The Chief’s Words – because “those white guys at Pinnacle Entertainment mistitled the sections in the previous books.” (Any product with the ability to look at itself humorously earns high points with me.) This lay-out is very nice – too often source material is only useful for the GM or reveals world secrets to the players because it lumps all the information about organizations and locations together. Nor have I seen this lay-out lead to useless regurgitation of the same information in each section. Pinnacle always seems to be careful in giving the GM just the extra information, without restating what has been said 50 pages earlier.

STYLE AND LAYOUT

My one persistent problem with Deadlands products is that the graphical presentation of the books fails to do anything for me. It is clearly meant to be evocative, but it just sits like a lump of clay for me. The cover art of Ghost Dancers, like all Deadlands products I’ve seen is a high-quality, excellent piece of work. The interior art, on the other hand, varies wildly from just slightly above average to pathetically horrid. The special font they use for headings is supposed to be mood-setting I suppose, but I’m pretty much indifferent. They have, however, solved one of my big problems with the main Deadlands rulebook – the type font is a nicely readable size, as opposed to the unnecessarily huge size used earlier.

One last minor complaint. Deadlands products use a nice referencing system to take you from one section of the book to another (for example, if you’re reading a section on the Sioux Nations in the War Party section you might get a page reference indicating that more material on this subject can be found in the Chief’s Words section). For this referencing system they use three miniature pictures – a gun and hatchet for the War Party, a holy symbol for the Sacred Ground, and a chief’s head and headdress for the Chief’s Words. These three pictures are then repeated on the title pages of each of the three sections. The problem comes because they apparently created these images at the thumbnail size for the referencing system and then just blew them up for a full-page presentation on the title pages. Anyone who has done this will know that you end up with a fuzzy image at the larger scale – and that’s precisely what you get in Deadlands products. Suggestion: Compose the pictures at the larger scale and then shrink them down to the smaller scale.

None of these are serious problems in my opinion, they just don’t click with me properly. A quick flip-through of the book should be enough for you to judge whether or not you agree with me.

Indeed, these problems are inconsequential. The lay-out of the product is excellent. Material is laid out in an intuitive and consistent fashion and a detailed table of contents will make it easy to find what you’re looking for. You won’t find any weird placement of information – such as sticking a section on weapon damage in the equipment section rather than the combat section with the rest of the weapon damage information – that seems to be trendy with certain companies.

So, to sum up: Externally this product is visually fantastic. Internally, it is visually boring. The lay-out is useful, productive, and easy-to-use however – and that’s the most important thing. It is only my aesthetic sense which is offended.

THE WAR PARTY

The first section of the book serves both as a reference for players and as a general introduction to the book. The first chapter (“Welcome to the Lodge”), serves as that general introduction.

Chapter Two (“Indian Country”) gives a broad overview of Indian history, as well as comprehensive look at the major tribes and organization of Indian society. Chapter Three (“Making an Indian”) provides details on modifying the basic character creation rules found in the main rulebook for Indian characters – including your role in Indian society, the selection of your Guardian Spirit, and new aptitudes, edges, hindrances, knacks, and gear. The section of the book also contains new archetypes for use by the GM and players both.

Chapter Four (“Guardian Spirits”) details the workings of Guardian Spirits, while Chapter Five (“Strange Medicine”) expands and improves upon the medicine rules found in the main rulebook, providing more options and details.

SACRED GROUND

Chapter Six (“Objects Sacred and Profane”) detail the rules for creating and using ‘medicine objects’ (magical items). This is an exceptionally useful resource for the GM, as is the next chapter (Chapter Seven – “The Hunting Grounds”) which details the extradimensional realm of the Hunting Grounds.

If there is one reason above all others to buy this book it is the material found in Chapter Seven. With amazing grace the designers allow the Hunting Grounds to be not only something of significance and importance to Indians, but to all religious groups. In the Weird West the magical forces which have been interpreted through the faith and religion of humanity are all too real – and it was the release of those forces from what the Indians call the Hunting Grounds (and Christians would call Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell) during the Reckoning that created the alternate history which Deadlands details.

In my mind, therefore, understanding and being able to use the Hunting Grounds in a Deadlands campaign is extremely important – and this book is the key to allowing that. As a result, every Marshal/Chief/GM should own a copy of Ghost Dancers.

THE CHIEF’S WORDS

Chapter Eight (“The Chief’s Guide”) provides everything about the Indians of the Weird West that the players just aren’t supposed to know. I won’t go into details here, because there are probably several players reading this review, but some of the stuff you uncover here is truly exciting and made me want to go out and start writing adventures.

Chapter Nine (“Secret Societies”) details the Ghost Dance (from which the book gets its name) and the Raven Cult. The Ghost Dance is a ritual revealed to the Paiute tribe – it preaches of peace and tolerance, and foretells of a time when the white man will be driven from his lands and the red man shall return to power. A time which shall be prophesied in the birth of a pure white buffalo calf.

The Raven Cult — as anyone whose familiar with the Deadlands game knows – is responsible for the Reckoning. They, too, foretell a future where the white man has been driven from the lands of the Indians – but they see the way to this future as one paved in blood and violence.

The GM will learn everything he needs to know about these two secret societies. Once again this is important information and mandates buying this sourcebook. The information on the Raven Cult is important because of the role in the origins of the Weird West setting. The Ghost Dance is important because they are clearly going to become important in the future of the Weird West.

SUMMARY

This book is an excellent and required resource for the GM of a Deadlands game, but only of mild interest to a player (even if the player happens to have an Indian character). I suggest that only one copy is really necessary for any gaming group, but that one copy is necessary for any long-term campaigns set in the Weird West.

Style: 3
Substance: 4

Author: Paul Beakley
Company/Publisher: Pinnacle Entertainment Group
Cost: $20.00
Page count: 128
ISBN: 1-889546-20-8
Originally Posted: 1998/06/19

Tagline: Wizards of the Coast and the Bourbaki card game design team strike again in this surprisingly fascinating and addictive card game, the first in a line of non-collectible games meant to provide competition with games like Uno and Skip-Bo.

Thirteen years later, Twitch remains one of my favorite card games. My review speaks highly of it, but a game with that kind of staying power deserves special attention. Sadly, it is long out of print and virtually unattainable as I write this. If you get a chance, though, I recommend you grab a copy ASAP.

The premise of the game is simple: Someone plays a card. The cards tells you who goes next. If it’s you, you’ve got to play another card before someone challenges you and you have to take the entire stack of cards. If it’s not you, you’ve got to figure out who it is and challenge them before they can play. Be careful, if you play or challenge wrong you’ll end up taking those cards.

Simple, right? Right.

Until you start playing the game, that is. Then what seems so simple on the surface suddenly seems to be the most complicated thing you’ve ever done.

The basic game centers around eight different cards. The four basic cards are Left, Right, 2 Left and 2 Right. These cards tell you who goes next (the player to your left, your right, two seats to your left, and two seats to your right – respectively). In addition the card Ditto means that the last card’s effect is repeated, the card Back At Ya! sends the turn back to the last player to play a card. The last trick is that all players are given a color card, and a duplicate of this card is place in the play deck. When that color card is played the person to who it belongs must play next. Finally there are the challenge cards – these cards are keyed to the colors of the players. If a player is too slow or if they make a mistake, you can challenge them with the challenge card corresponding to their color.

The name of the game is speed, and once you’re into the heat of the chase you’re going to find that these simple rules are more than challenge enough.

Now let’s take another step, into the Advanced Game. At this point we add three more cards: Pick a Color, Rotate Colors, and Left to Right. These are called “Pause Cards”, when they are played gameplay temporarily stops while their results are gauged. Pick a Color means that the person who just played the card picks the color of another player, and then that player plays a card (resuming play). Rotate colors means that everyone takes their color card (indicating what color they are) and hand them to the player on their left – this causes confusion regarding what color to use to challenge which players and what color you are when the color cards come up during gameplay. Finally, Left to Right means that all cards referring to a particular direction mean exactly the opposite – left means right and right means left. Conveniently there are exactly two of these cards, meaning that once play is reversed, it will eventually turn back the other way.

Twitch is the first in a line of games Wizards of the Coast is producing in order to apparently attempt to compete with traditional family games. On the strength of this product I intend to go out of my way to also purchase Pivot, Alpha Blitz, and GoWild! — the other products in this line-up.

At seven bucks you can’t lose with this game. It won’t be put on the shelf next to your Magic cards or your Doomtown cards, but I think it more than amply deserves a place alongside such classic games as Uno and Skip-Bo.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: Richard Garfield, Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, and Dave Pettey
Company/Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $6.95
Page count: n/a
ISBN: 1-57530-581-X
Originally Posted: 1998/05/30

Every so often I’ll indulge in what I call a “mythos delve”. This is where I’ll just dive wholeheartedly into whatever transmedia empire has transfixed my attention. A few years ago it was Star Wars. Before that Heavy Gear, The Matrix (this one was easier), Star Trek, and so forth. (This exploration of multi-faceted fictional milieus is undoubtedly part of what I find appealing about RPGs.)

Most recently, the Halo franchise has captured my attention. A little less than a decade ago, I played both Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, but then the franchise jumped to the Xbox 360 and I didn’t. That recently changed, however, and I started playing my way through the older games as prep for the newer ones. In the interim, I had also acquired the first three Halo novels from the $1 racks at Half-Price Books, which brings us here.

HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED (Bungie Studios): I’m not going to attempt anything even remotely resembling a full review of the Halo video games. (Largely because that would be redundant and pointless.) But what I will say is this: The original video game was basically Ringworld + Starship Troopers + zombies. That’s a pretty awesome premise.

HALO – THE FALL OF REACH (Eric Nylund): I bring that up primarily because the premise for The Fall of Reach can basically be summed up as Ender’s Game + Starship Troopers.

This proves to be an effective and entertaining variation on the themes of the original game. By shifting the underlying tropes of the story, Nylund manages to weave a tale which is true to the original without merely rehashing its content. (This can be a very fine line for tie-in fiction to tread: If you simply retread the original the result is repetitive and dull — like looking at something that’s been xeroxed too many times. If you chart your own course, on the other hand, you can end up violating the reader’s sense of how the fictional universe should work.)

Unfortunately, the training sequences lack the cleverness and unique insight which make Ender’s Game or The Hunger Games into effective young adult literature by bringing the reader along on the protagonist’s journey of discovery.The military ops are handled with more cleverness and detail, but end up being just a trifle too disjointed: They’re effective vignettes, but don’t feel like a cohesive narrative building towards some greater climax.

With that being said, if you’re a fan of Halo — or just a fan of military SF — this is a book worth checking out. It’s a fun read that kept me turning the pages.

(As a tangential note, I was amused when this book made me aware — for the very first time — that the SPARTANs are supposed to be super-fast. One of the things I had always kind of liked about Halo was the more slow / more-realistic pace it had compared to other shooters of the time. Discovering that it was actually supposed to be representing superhuman speed only served to drive home how completely inferior console controls are for first-person shooters.)

HALO – THE FLOOD (William C. Dietz): The back cover pitch for The Flood is that it will depict the events from the first video game from alternative points of view. That actually sounded really interesting to me: One of the things I really enjoyed about Halo: Combat Evolved was the implication that there was a wider, guerrilla-style war being fought across the surface of Halo as both the UNSC and Covenant forces explored this strange and alien world. Between the armed conflict, the mega-relics of the Forerunners, and the emerging threat of the Flood itself, there’s a ton of potential for developing original material while capitalizing on the video game narrative itself by showing the Master Chief’s journey (and its impact) through the eyes of others.

Unfortunately, the back cover pitch was lying to me. 80% of the book is just a novelization of the game (which is precisely as interesting as you would imagine a faithful novelization of a first-person shooter would be). The rest is just bland cliche starring a rotating cast of dimwitted stereotypes who have been hit over the head a few too many times with the Stupid Protagonist Hammer.

This is a book you should definitely skip.

HALO – FIRST STRIKE (Eric Nylund): One of the most fantastic and fascinating aspects of media consumption is the act of closure. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud refers to this phenomenon as “blood in the gutters”, demonstrating how the space between one panel and the next forces the reader to perform a creative act: “Here, in the limbo of the gutter, the human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.” He uses the example of showing a serial killer raising an axe in one panel and then “hearing” the victim scream off-panel in the next. “I may have drawn a raised axe in this example, but I’m not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you committing it in your own style.” (The parallel to a horror film in which a victim is killed off-screen is obvious.)

But this phenomenon, in my opinion, is not limited to small events. And one of the dangers of tie-in fiction which attempts to “fill in the gaps” between one story and the next is that it can very easily start screwing with the closure which the viewer has already provided. This creates a natural friction and resistance from the reader as the foreign, incompatible material tries to “wipe out” their own creative response.

This is a problem which First Strike — which seeks to fill in the gap between Halo and Halo 2 — runs into headlong. And it’s severely exacerbated by some significantly inaccurate handling of continuity from Halo 2 (which may be at least partially the result of Nylund writing the book before the game was finished).

With that being said, Nylund succeeds once again at giving us an entertaining pulp romp through the Halo universe. The military ops are once again clever and varied, and Nylund also succeeds at bringing to life a cast of supporting characters that give the book depth and significance.

GRADES:

HALO – THE FALL OF REACH: C+
HALO – THE FLOOD: F
HALO – FIRST STRIKE: C-

Eric Nylund / William C. Dietz / Eric Nylund
Published: 2001 / 2003 / 2003
Publisher: Del Rey
Cover Price: $6.99 / $6.99 / $6.99
ISBN: 0345451325 / 0345459210 / 0345467817
Buy Now!

Since writing my review of D&D Gamma World, I have GMed two more sessions of the game while picking up a couple new players. On the basis of these sessions, I offer this random assortment of final thoughts on the game:

(1) The “incompleteness problem” (where powers will reference and use rules which are present in 4th Edition but have been removed from Gamma World) is really huge and glaring. It proved to be far more troublesome than I had anticipated. If I didn’t have previous experience with D&D, I would have quickly found Gamma World completely unplayable.

(2) Encounters in 4th Edition just take too damn long. When I put together The Egyptian Incursion I thought it would be a fun little one-shot: 6-7 modest combat encounters, a light scaffolding of investigative work, and some evocative Egyptian pulp mythos. Instead it took three sessions, with even the simplest combat encounters taking 70-90 minutes to resolve.

(Direct contrast: On Friday, I ran Gamma World. One of the encounters was a big, solo bruiser vs. 5 PCs. It took 70 minutes. On Saturday, I ran my Ptolus campaign. One of the encounters was a big, solo bruiser vs. 6 PCs. It took 15 minutes.)

(3) I made a strategic error in handling the final encounters of the adventure. I momentarily forgot the system I was using and made the mistake of playing the game world: I allowed the surviving monsters outside the tomb to flee into the tomb and seek reinforcements. This completely unbalanced the precarious encounter balance of 4th Edition and resulted in a near-TPK (with only two PCs managing to flee the scene in a badly damaged pickup truck).

(4) This is one of the reasons I really dislike the My Precious Encounters(TM) school of adventure design. Balancing every single encounter on a razor’s edge can make the game very unforgiving. And Gamma World is even less forgiving due to the lack of any characters fitting into the role of Leader and a complete paucity of healing. There’s simply no elasticity in the system for dealing with situations that turn pear-shaped.

(Nor can you simply design encounters using a different methodology, because Gamma World hard-codes My Precious Encounters(TM) into the system.)

FINAL ASSESSMENT: I had a couple of players at my table who had only previously played in my OD&D open table. They preferred the system to OD&D, which is probably a fair assessment. (I noted particularly positive responses to having a skill system, which I hadn’t anticipated but which makes perfect sense in retrospect.)

The character creation system was universally beloved. There was a lot of talk about taking the character creation system and grafting it onto some other system: Legends & Labyrinths, OD&D, Apocalypse World. (I might also take a look at something like Mutant Future or Encounter Critical.) This is something that I think is quite likely to happen in the future. I’m also strongly tempted to start goofing around with how to generally cannibalize the whole “randomly determine two origins and then combine them” thing for all kinds of character generation. It’s very, very effective and evocative as an improv seed.

But unless my perception radically shifts in wrapping up the “Famine in Far-Go” adventure I’m playing in with another group, D&D Gamma World is going to get shelved.

Tagline: “Chess will never be the same!” This innocent looking pack of 80 cards completely alters the game of Chess – from a static strategic puzzle to a dynamic tactical conflict. Moody and evocative art by Rogerio Vilela. Translated from the original French.

I actually have quite vivid memories of writing this review. It was the first time I really became aware of how thoroughly I’d been bitten by the reviewing “bug” because I started thinking about how I would write the review of the game as I was playing the game.

The tagline of Knightmare Chess is, “Move a piece. Play a Card. Chess will never be the same…”

There you have the whole game. In the elegant box in which Knightmare Chess comes you will find 80 cards – each of which subtly alters the rules of Chess in different ways. These cards let you do all the things you always wish you could do in a tight moment during a game of Chess – resurrect a piece which has been captured, move a piece out of the way, take not one piece, but many on a single move. On each of your turns you can play one card.

When first approaching this game I was both anticipatory and doubtful. Anticipatory because it sounded like a fun thing to do once or twice. Doubtful because chess is an ancient game – its grace and its beauty come from the fact that its rules are carefully balanced, all the pieces are known, and the challenge comes from manipulating a known set of variables in a strategic way to overcome your opponent.

The premise of Knightmare Chess, while seemingly innocuous, actually radically alters the very basic appeal and structure of the game. The rules are no longer balanced, they are in constant flux. The pieces are not known, they can be altered and rearranged. There is no known set of variables, the variables are unknown and changing.

At first glance, therefore, Knightmare Chess has the potential to completely screw the only appeal chess has – its strategic component.

After playing the game awhile I realized I was wrong. Knightmare Chess transformed Chess into a radically different game, but it did not destroy it. Where Chess is a static strategic puzzle (with its elements known and the possible interactions between pieces completely proscribed), Knightmare Chess is a dynamic tactical conflict. Just because the rules are always changing, doesn’t mean that Knightmare Chess is an inferior game. It does mean, however, that it appeals to an entirely different aesthetic than Chess.

Chess has often been described as a wargame. Indeed, in some ways it is – if you are willing to accept a certain degree of abstraction. Nonetheless, it is an odd one – one in which you have only a certain number of troops, in which both sides are equal, and in which everything is ultimately predictable. If Knightmare Chess is similarly a wargame carried to an extreme degree of abstraction, then it presents a model of modern warfare – where the sides can quickly become unequal, where reinforcement is conceivable, and where combat is anything but predictable.

Knightmare Chess is a fascinating game. If you are a chess player, approach it with an open mind. If you have no taste for chess, then it is entirely conceivable that this game will appeal to you nonetheless.

It should be noted that I am using a copy of the Second Edition for the purposes of this review. The differences between the first and second editions are extremely subtle and largely inconsequential to the overall gameplay and assessment of this game. For a list of differences you can check Steve Jackson Game’s website.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: Pierre Clequin and Bruno Faidutti
Company/Publisher: Steve Jackson Games
Cost: $14.95
Page count: n/a
ISBN: 1-55634-319-1
Originally Posted: 1998/05/30