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 Despite having withdrawn my cash into other areas I had become aware of various titles over the years that had interested me to one degree or another: Feng Shui, CORPS, Theatrix… and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.

Go to Part 1

(click for PDF)

This worksheet may not be the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, but I designed it for tracking key information while running a hexcrawl and I’ve found it to be useful. The sheet is broken down into several parts.

HEX TRACKER: The left column is a hex tracker. Write down the current day and watch in the left hand column (for example, 3-1 is the first watch on the third day), then mark the hex the party is currently in and their intended direction of travel. Add information on veer if the party gets lost and use the check boxes to mark off progress.

When you run out of check boxes, the party has left the hex. Reference their intended direction of travel and veer to determine what hex they’ve entered and write that down in the next row. Repeat.

ENCOUNTER LIST: In order to save time, I’ll pregenerate encounters and write them down here. Use left hand column to note what day and watch the encounter will occur during, write the encounter you generate in the center column, and indicate if it’s a lair or tracks encounter (if necessary).

If you generate a location encounter, just write LOCATION in the encounter box.

MARCHING ORDER: Below the encounter list there’s a graphical depiction of a dungeon corridor that you can use to write down the party’s current marching order. (It works as well in the wilderness as in the dungeon, of course.) The worksheet was designed for the original 1974 rules, so it gives enough space for 3 people to march abreast down a standard 10′-wide corridor. If you’re using a rule system that only allows for 2 people to march abreast, adjust accordingly.

WATCH LIST: Below the marching order we have a watch list. This basically assumes that the party travels for two watches per day and then rests for four watches. Write down the characters standing guard during each watch in one of the boxes.

PARTY’S BASE MOVEMENT SPEED: Fairly self-explanatory. Figure out who the slowest member of the party is and jot down the appropriate values here.

Go to Part 8: Sample Hex Keys

This material is covered by the Open Game License.

Go to Part 1

This checklist pulls all of the preceding material together into a clean procedure. Simply follow the checklist for each watch, and you should generally find running the hexcrawl to be smooth sailing.

WATCH CHECKLIST

1. DIRECTION AND MODE OF TRAVEL

2. ARE THEY LOST?

• If they are not following a landmark or trail, make a Navigation check.
• If they are lost, determine veer. If they are already lost, veer can be increased but not decreased.

3. ENCOUNTER CHECK

• Determine time within the watch (1d8 for the half hour).
• TIP: If encounter occurs before last half hour of travel, use travel by hour to determine progress before the encounter occurs, then jot down the number of hours left in the watch.

4. DETERMINE ACTUAL DISTANCE TRAVELED

• Roll 2d6+3 x 10% x Average Distance.
• Make a Navigation check see if they accurately estimated their distance traveled.
• TIP: If their progress would cause them to leave a hex during a watch and that would cause their terrain type to change, calculate progress by hour. When they reach the hex edge, note how many hours are left. Then you can reference the new hex, calculate the new average distance, and continue marking progress.

HEX PROGRESS

• It takes 12 miles of progress to exit one of the hex’s 3 far faces. It takes 6 miles of progress to exit on the hex’s 3 near faces.
• Changing direction within a hex will result in the loss of 2 miles of progress.

LEAVING A HEX

• Determine new hex (by applying current veer to their direction of travel).
• If they were lost, make a Navigation check to see if they recognize it. If they do, they can attempt to reorient. If they do not, veer accumulates. (Note: Using a compass automatically resets veer at the hex border even if they don’t recognize that they were off course.)

Go to Part 7: DM’s Worksheet

This material is covered by the Open Game License.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is an absolutely stunning and soul-searingly beautiful film. I saw it in 3D on an original IMAX screen (which undoubtedly assisted the breathtaking vistas), but if you want to see two hours of cinematic splendor this film will absolutely deliver that.

It is a testament to the film’s grandeur that I was absolutely captivated by it from one end to the other. Because everything else about the movie is mind-numbingly awful.

The problem can be easily summed up: The script is two tons of stupid in a one ton bag. The rest of this post is just a venting litany of its stupidities, so…

SPOILERS AHOY…

(1) Early in the film, while exploring an alien planet, the entire crew removes their helmets. This is the moment when I abruptly lost all sympathy or empathy with the characters, because they were all clearly idiots.

I mean, I was OK with the first guy doing it. He’d been consistently portrayed as cocky, arrogant, and naive. His instruments tell him that unknown chemical processes are terraforming the air to make it breathable and between his naivete, his arrogance, and his irrational faith in the goodwill of the Engineers it makes sense for him to do the stupid thing there.

But while he’s doing that stupid thing, literally everyone else is telling him not to do it. Then he takes off his helmet, he doesn’t immediately die after three seconds, and… suddenly everyone thinks it’s OK? Holy crap. You guys are dumb as bricks.

(2) Then, even after they believe that there’s the risk of biological contamination on the planet, they continue to deliberately walk around with their helmets off. The scenes of characters practically nuzzling their faces into alien chemicals with unknown properties are absolutely mind-boggling.

(3) From a structural standpoint, the screenplay fails again and again to provide necessary exposition. One of the things that made Alien an effective horror film was that the properties of the xenomorphs were clearly translated to the audience. This understanding allows the audience to experience dread when the characters wittingly or unwittingly take dangerous actions.

By contrast, the “black death” which forms the primary threat of Prometheus doesn’t make any sense and doesn’t seem to follow anything even vaguely resembling consistent rules: If you drink it, you get sick. If you get a face full of it, it turns you into a contortionist berserker. If some worms fall into it, they’ll turn into face-fuckers and kill you. If you have sex with someone who has been contaminated, then you’ll have a mystical pregnancy. The result of that mystical pregnancy will also face-fuck and kill you, but this time it’ll work like a facehugger and spawn a proto-xenomorph. If you get infected and then you get decapitated, your head will explode.

This failure of exposition extends to minor stuff, too: Sometimes the suits will process oxygen from the surrounding atmosphere. Sometimes they won’t.

(4) Ironically, despite failing to provide any of the clear exposition required to make the film successful, the screenwriter handles conversations between characters by having them speak in ham-fisted exposition without any subtlety or humanity at all.

It’s all well and good to want to tell a story about children wanting to kill their parents (as counterpoint to our alien parents wanting to kill their children), but your method for telling that story should be a little more subtle than just having both children say, “I want to kill you, dad.”

(5) On a similar note, the writer is clearly incompetent when it comes to setting up any kind of dramatic tension. For example, one of the climactic scenes is the main character begging the ship captain to take down the alien vessel before it can go to Earth and wipe out human life. Structurally, this scene is clearly meant to be tense: What will the captain do? Will he believe her and do the right thing? Or try to save himself and damn us all?

Only it’s not tense at all. Because two scenes earlier the writer went out of his way to have the captain literally say, “The only thing I care about in this universe is making sure that alien vessel doesn’t get to Earth.”

Wow. I wonder if he’ll do the thing he told us he would absolutely do no matter what just a couple of scenes ago?

(6) I’ve tried my best, but I can’t come up with any explanation for why David chooses to deliberately infect the archaeologist with the “black death”. It accomplishes absolutely nothing and does nothing to advance any of the agendas that David is supposedly pursuing.

(7) In a different film, I might believe that the willingness of Guy Pierce’s character to ignore the clear signs of biological doom that people are trying to warn him about is justified by his desperation to find a way to survive. But in the wider context of the film, it’s really just another bit of stupid to pile on top of all the other stupid.

(8) We can probably just toss it on the pile next to, “I want you dead and gone, dad.” “Oh? Really? Well, why don’t you just stay here in charge of the only ship that can take me home, then.”

(9) How do you lose track of two guys whose position is being tracked on a giant map directly behind you? How do those guys get lost when they have access to a map of the complex? Especially when one of them is the guy who apparently specializes in mapping and takes great pride in his “mapping pups”?

(10) So the aliens want to build a bioweapon to wipe out Earth. Fair enough. They build a facility on an otherwise empty planet because they don’t want to risk the bioweapon contaminating them. Good idea. But then why are they telling primitive cultures on Earth where the bioweapon manufacturing plant is? What is that supposed to be accomplishing?

(11) Holy shit! Their DNA is an exact 100% match for ours! … uh, okay. Then why are they 12 feet tall?

When the film throws a lampshade on “okay, let’s just ignore Darwinism” I’m willing to go along with it. But if you’re just going to throw stupid up on the screen over and over and over again, I’m going to check out.

SPECULATIONS

I don’t mind the ambiguity of the Engineers at all. Their motivations for creating us? Their desire to destroy us? The possibility that the group responsible for the former and the latter aren’t the same group of Engineers? Those are all great questions and they’re probably better for not being answered.

On a similar note, I think the film would have been better if it had ended with Elizabeth flying off on her journey of faith and searching instead of tacking on a “BTW, this is totally a prequel” coda. It probably would have been better to bump that until after the credits if it absolutely needed to be there.

But since it is there, lemme speculate a little: My hypothesis is that the bioweapon-that-creates-xenomorphs didn’t stay contained to this planet. The xenomorphs escaped 35,000 years ago and evolved. The xenomorphs and dead space jockey we see in Alien are the legacy of that history.

What I don’t understand is what the opening scene of Prometheus is supposed to be. It appears to be an Engineer sacrificing himself in order to seed Earth with life while his ship flies away. (Note that after we zoom in on his genetic structure breaking apart, we see part of it recombining and forming new cells.)  But if that’s true, I’m not sure how it’s supposed to hook into the legacy of Engineers being worshiped by primitive humans.