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.

Tagline: Cheapass Games are cool. Bad Bond jokes are cool. This game is cool. You cool with that? Or do I have to kill you in a bizarre, drawn out fashion which will leave plenty of opportunities to escape?

“Imagine, just once, luring the master spy into your evil lair and putting a bullet in his head. Imagine resisting the temptation to gloat over your prize, to tell him your secret plans, to let him escape certain death and blow up your lair in the process. Imagine winning.

Yeah, right.

Before I kill you, Mister Bond, I am going to tell you my entire life story, because I believe that you are the only man alive who would understand…”

I’ve been hearing good things about Cheapass Games for quite awhile now, but only last month did I finally find a store which sells them. Whoa boy, has it been worth the wait. Before I Kill You, Mister Bond… is one of the coolest games I’ve ever played, simply because its conceptual basis is so excellent for a game among friends.

For those who haven’t been let in on the secret yet, Cheapass Games produces games with ultra-original concepts and mechanics on very cheap materials so that they can keep the prices down. Do not confuse “cheap” with poor in quality, though. Before I Kill You, Mister Bond… comes in a handsomely designed white paper envelope which has been printed with a simple, but elegant cover. The instructions take up both sides of a single sheet of paper and there are two decks of cards – one printed on yellowish card stock, the other on greenish card stock. Everything is professionally put together and printed – it just doesn’t come in a cardboard box with laminated cards. Games, as their mission statement says, are fun because of how they’re designed – not because of the clever pieces of plastic with which they come. The pay-off to you is that Cheapass Games are just that – cheap as hell. If Before I Kill You, Mister Bond… was produced like most other games it would cost $20, not $5.

The concept of the game is simple: You take on the role of a super-villain in the classic James Bond tradition – massive secret bases, advanced technological wonders, and master plans… all ruined by our need to design Rube Goldberg machines to kill off the super-spy who comes after us. (Anyone who has seen Austin Powers knows the joke.)

The deck is made of three types of cards — lairs, spies, and doublers. The spies are a different color in order to make them easy to find… “just like in real life. ‘Hi! I’m Doctor Kelley! Any messages for me? Say, I’m a Spy!’” Each player is dealt a hand of cards and play begins in a clockwise manner.

Each turn consists of two phases. In the first phase you can play a single lair card from your own hand. Lair cards have different point values and the value of your lair is the point total of all the lair cards you have played. In the second phase you can play a spy card – either from your hand, anyone else’s hand, or from the top of the deck. You can also play a team of spies from your own hand (but not anyone else’s or the top of the deck). You play the spy cards against a particular lair – either your own, or someone else’s. Each spy has a point value (a team of spies has a point value equal to their total). If that value is larger than the lair then the spy infiltrates the lair and destroys it. If that value is smaller or equal to the value of the lair then the spy is captured.

Once a spy is captured the owner of the lair can either kill the spy or taunt the spy. If they kill the spy they score the number of points the spy is worth. The other option is to play a doubler card, which will double the value of the spy. Each doubler card is printed with a letter and has a matching doubler card with an identical letter somewhere else in the deck. If a doubler card is played it can be challenged by its matched pair. If this challenge takes place the spy escapes and the lair is destroyed.

So, overall, your goal is to build a lair with which to catch spies and score points. The first person to score 30 points wins the game.

The place where the game really shines, though, is the comedic interaction of the players. The cards are all jokes playing off the spy adventure/thriller genre (the Bond films, The Avengers, etc.). Most notable are the doubler cards – all of which are printed with cheezy super-villain taunts, such as: “I shall taunt you with this deadly weapon, blithely unaware that a child could have untied those ropes by now.” Having the players read these aloud in their best super-villain accents is truly the coolest part of the game.

There is, unfortunately, a massive problem with this game: It doesn’t work. I playtested it using a group of three and then a group of four players (it’s advertised as being for 2-6) and the dynamics and balance of the deck simply don’t work properly to let the rules fully realize themselves. Because spies can be played from essentially anywhere it is impossible to build up teams of spies, because any attempt to do so will invariably have someone else use your spies against you or for themselves. Lairs are difficult to get established (because they are easy to destroy), but once they are established they are almost impossible to destroy because you can’t build up teams of spies. Because there are an equal number of lairs, spies, and doublers in the deck, invariably by the time any sort of serious spy-catching is going on (because the lairs take so long to build up to a point where they can capture spies) everyone has built up a huge reserve of doubler cards – making it infeasible to play any of them (because someone else invariably has the matching card).

In the end these flaws meant that all the games we played (and we played nearly a dozen) went down the exact same route: Most lairs were wiped out repeatedly until one person got a lair large enough so that it couldn’t destroyed. That person then won the game. Very few doublers were ever played, because whenever they were it only resulted in the person’s lair being wiped out.

The rules themselves, IMO, work, but the deck of cards simply isn’t properly balanced. Plus more cards overall would have been nice because the phrases on these got tired pretty quick – and its the panache and cleverness of those phrases which are the primary strength of this game.

Nonetheless, this is a pretty classy game. At $5 it ain’t a bad buy, particularly since you can get quite a few laughs out of it.

Style: 5
Substance: 3

Writers: James Ernest
Publisher: Cheapass Games
Price: $4.95
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 1999/04/13

This is a game I enjoyed playing for about 3 weeks. Then I wrote a review about how much I liked it. Then I never played it again. Games that are fun only because the content on the cards is amusing simply don’t last. (See, also, Munchkin Quest.)

Also: 14 years later, the idea of needing to wait for a game until “finally finding a store that sells them” is simply adorable.

If you’re interested in checking this game out, you should be aware that Cheapass Games got hit with a cease-and-desist order in 2000. The game is now marketed as James Ernest’s Totally Renamed Spy Game.

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

Tagline: Possibly the best superhero setting ever created specifically for a roleplaying game. Inspired by works like Astro City, Marvels, and Kingdom Come this is a balanced, believable setting for the Champions game.

I knew I was picking up a high-quality product with San Angelo: City of Heroes when I turned to page five and saw the first proper illustration of the book (ignoring one which accompanies the table of contents): A boy looking up into the sky, his basketball laying forgotten on the ground next to him; behind him the shadow of a caped figure flying past. The first words of the book? “San Angelo is truly the City of Heroes.” Definitely.

STRENGTHS

Patrick Sweeney and the folks down at Gold Rush Games have really put together a gem. San Angelo, a fictional Californian city, takes the best elements of Astro City, Marvels, and Kingdom Come (projects all written by Kurt Busiek and Mark Waid who were, in turn, influenced by great comic book artisans of the past) and adds spice. In a little over 255 pages San Angelo: City of Heroes delivers the type of tantalizing hooks and richly textured background that is all too often lacking in your average sourcebook.

You will find that there is nothing lacking in this book. You get a finely detailed history of the city (dating back to its pre-colonial roots), a look at its current geography (in a neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown), an analysis of its major players (with holes deliberately left to be filled in and personalized by the GM), a look at its commercial development (from the biggest companies to the fast food joints your characters would probably find themselves hanging out at), and much more. You are left with the indelible impression that San Angelo is a living, breathing city. That’s worth the price of admission right there – far too many city supplements in the RPG industry fail to accomplish that, even when they’re based on real cities. For San Angelo to accomplish that, while being entirely fictional, is impressive feat.

Further, Sweeney has done an excellent job of making San Angelo a balanced, believable superhero world. He chooses not to include some of the more extreme staples of the superhero genre (such as aliens), but he does so in order to capture a feel of “pseudo-realism” which readers of Astro City will quickly recognize and everyone will appreciate.

In addition to the big stuff, the book also has all those nice little touches which turn a good product into a great product. The attention to detail is exquisite, but the most noticeable of these touches are the quotes from the citizens of San Angelo. These are both amusing and insightful and a prime example of the high quality his product offers.

Finally, although the book is designed with the Hero game system in mind, because the setting works so well as a setting it transcends its intended engine and could be successfully used in almost any superhero campaign. San Angelo is an inspirational product, and succeeds brilliantly because of that.

WEAKNESSES

Marring this relatively perfect picture are a few flaws. First, the lay-out is not always as keen as it might be (there’s one place where an inset causes a line of text to be reduced to less than six characters).

Second, the book lacks an index. The ultra-detailed Table of Contents typical of Hero products helps make up for that, but nothing is more annoying than trying to track down information without an index. Especially if time is of the essence (such as during the middle of a gaming session).

Finally, although the book is chock full of NPCs, not enough of those PCs are supers. It has been said that what makes one science fiction universe different from another is the aliens. That may or may not be true, but it is almost certainly true that what makes one superhero setting different from another are the superheroes themselves. The explanation for the lack of super NPCs is that the PCs are supposed to be the focus of the story. Well, yes, of course. But haven’t you ever heard of the word “crossover”? And who would want to adventure in the Marvel Universe if it wasn’t because they shared that universe with Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and a host of others? I consider this lack to be the most serious problem the book possesses, but it is certainly not a crippling one.

CONCLUSION

If you have even the slightest interest in superhero roleplaying, buy this book. If you’re looking to start a new campaign there’s a good chance this will save you a lot of problems. If you have an established campaign then San Angelo would make an excellent addition to your world with a few modifications. The strengths of the book vastly outweigh the handful of weaknesses and what looks to be a strong line of support products are already on GRG’s production schedule. You won’t be disappointed.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Writers: Patrick Sweeney
Publisher: Gold Rush Games
Price: $25.00
Page Count: 255
ISBN: 1-890305-03-0

Originally Posted: 1999/03/17

Although I have never managed to run an actual game session in San Angelo, my fond memories of this book still mark it as one my favorite city supplements of all time. It managed to make the city feel unique, believable, and unmistakably alive while also managing to capture the ineffable excitement of a world filled with superheroes.

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

Tagline: If you’re the type that likes GM screens or interesting tidbits of knowledge concerning the World of Darkness, this product will probably be a satisfying purchase.

The Storyteller’s Screen and the accompanying Storyteller’s Companion are both very good products for what they are, but there’s nothing particularly exciting or innovative about either – nor do I consider them crucial products to the gaming experience. Surely with the plethora of materials available for the Vampire game you should be able to find something else worth spending fifteen dollars for.

The Storyteller’s Screen is made up of four 8” x 11” panels. The GM’s side has: A list of the five traditions, the armor chart, a chart summarizing the thirteen generations, a summary of aura colors, a hierarchy of human sin, a blood pool chart, a combat maneuver chart, a chart for judging feats of strength, two weapons charts, a combat summary chart, an experience chart, a summary of difficulties, a summary of hunting, damage charts for fire and sunlight, plus a general health chart and a summary of various vehicle types. This is an impressive array of information, and I found it was generally useful. I was also impressed that White Wolf avoided the temptation of including a summary of character generation on the screen – something almost every GM’s screen seems to possess despite the very obvious fact that you will never, ever need to access that information in the course of actual gameplay.

The opposite side of the screen is a very nice mosaic comprised of various vampires looking either threateningly or seductively out at you. I found it be an excellent choice of art because the choice of colors meant that it wasn’t overly distracting, but at the same time it was not so monotonous as to become easily boring to look at after a short time. In general, if you’re into GM’s screens this one is extremely admirable.

The accompanying book – the Storyteller’s Companion — on the other hand, cannot be so lauded. This is your typical hodgepodge of material thrown together so that the GM’s screens doesn’t have to stand on its own. Included are three new bloodlines (the Daughters of Cacophony, the Salubri, and the Salmedi) along with their associated disciplines. There’s also an extensive list of new equipment and an expanded character sheet. All in all, fairly boring stuff in my opinion which could have been more effectively integrated into other products instead of being thrown together without any sense of clear purpose here.

The most useless section in the book, however, would be Secondary Abilities. These are a new set of rules meant to supplement the Primary Abilities found in the main rulebook. In general I saw little differential between these abilities and those in the rulebook (why, for example, they felt that Interrogation would be used less often (and therefore qualify as a secondary ability) than Performance (a primary ability from the main rulebook) is beyond me), but these secondary abilities are cheaper and subject to a slightly different set of rules. The net result, as the book itself says, is that these “Secondary Abilities add greater complexity to the game, but they also add greater complication” (you’ll note that the words “complexity” and “complication” can be seamlessly interchanged here). Nothing is really accomplished by their inclusion except unnecessary headaches. Personally if I were to use any of them I would treat them exactly as I treat Primary Abilities. It should also be noted that since the expanded character sheet takes these Secondary Abilities into account, the other nice features of the character sheet (an expanded background and history section) are rendered rather useless. Oh well.

In general I found the product uninspiring, although generally adequate for this type of thing.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Author: Clayton Oliver
Company/Publisher: White Wolf
Cost: $14.95
Page count: 70
ISBN: 1-56504-259-9

Originally Posted: 1999/02/17

One of the weird things about getting comp material for review is the essentially random nature of what you end up reviewing. You also end up reviewing stuff that you would never have actually bought for yourself, which creates a strange dynamic in which it becomes difficult to accurately judge the value of the material for people who actually are the target market. (Of course, one of the skills of a good reviewer is the ability to step out of your own shoes to judge the material as objectively as possible… while remembering that objectivity doesn’t mean relativity.)

In other news: Landscape screens are awesome and I’m not sure how we ever endured the taller screens of yore. I have also just realized that it’s been over ten years since I last played Vampire. That makes me a little sad.

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