Tagline: Best game of the year.

The opening paragraphs of this review launched a subtle salvo against what can only be described as the insanely bad reviews for UA which were getting posted to RPGNet at the time. These were reviews which, for example, were excoriating the game for not being as complex as GURPS. Or claiming that the game was completely unacceptable because its systems for magick were not practiced by real people in the real world. Seriously mind-numbingly bad reviewers.

Unsurprisingly, this salvo was not warmly welcomed by some.

I wish the original discussions had survived. They were… lively.

Reviewers should always keep in mind the creator’s goals.

It doesn’t matter what you’re reviewing – whether its a novel, a play, a movie, or a roleplaying game – the first thing you should ask yourself is: What was the creator trying to create? The reason you ask yourself this is because it is as pointless to judge Independence Day as a serious attempt to comment on the burdens of the presidency as it would be to judge Hamlet as a children’s story. Often you will hear a negative review of something not because it failed to accomplish what it set out to do, but because the reviewer didn’t like what was being attempted. Such a review is useless. Because it attempts to judge the creation as something which it is not it is as useless as a review of poker which explains why the game fails terribly at being the Great American novel.

Figuring out what was being attempted isn’t always easy. Sometimes you’re forced to ask yourself whose creative impulses you should honor. For example, if you’re reviewing a production of a Shakespearean play should you judge it based on how well it accomplished the director’s goals or how well it accomplished Shakespeare’s? (Personally I feel the director’s goal should be to fulfill the playwright’s goals – otherwise he should be doing a different play; hence I would go with the latter.) At other times it is necessary to call into question the surface goal itself and dive beneath the surface – for example an artist might fully intend to create a giant pink phallic symbol in Times Square, but you have to ask whether or not this is a good idea based on the underlying goals of art and the function Times Square. Nor is it always easy to figure out what a particular person’s goals were in creating something. More often than not you must rely on intuition to ordain what was intended.

Sometimes, though, you get lucky. Something in the work will clearly state was being attempted. You know that GURPS was designed to be a generic, universal system not only from the title, but because the designers included a short explanation of what was being attempted and what they hoped the game would accomplish.

The reason I bring all of this up is because after taking a look at the varied extant reviews of Unknown Armies I think it is necessary to explain where this review is coming from. Knowing where Unknown Armies is coming from is easy: Greg Stolze and John Tynes tell you specifically what their design goals were in the conveniently titled section “Design Goals” on pages four and five. Despite this several reviewers have flown in the face of commonsense and judged intentional decisions as “mistakes” or “flaws”.

So, just to be perfectly clear: If you don’t like simple systems, you won’t like Unknown Armies. (“Pages and pages of rules for ballistics-based damage and a complete flowchart-governed sub-system for picking locks are just some of the realism-focused rules you won’t find in UA.”) The fact that there is a detailed tracking system for character personality in this game is intentional, not a mistake or an anachronism. (“If your character occasionally kills someone, it’ll be up to you to justify why this is okay – and if you can’t, the game’s rules will penalize your character by hardening him against the notion of murder.”) If you don’t like roleplaying settings which attempt to be completely original (I’m not kidding – I actually saw someone complain because the game setting was too creative), then Unknown Armies isn’t a game you want to be playing.

“It’s time to stop playing games.”

OVERVIEW

Atlas Games has become a pretty impressive company. The 1990s have seen the origination of a couple of trends in RPGs: One, the World of Darkness and the host of games which have been inspired by it. Two, the simple, cinematic rule systems packed full of action-potential (usually with an anime or John Woo/Jackie Chan/Hong Kong influence). Atlas Games now owns the two games which providing the lightning rod to these two trends (Ars Magica and Feng Shui), and with the production of Unknown Armies they may very well have created the game which provides the perfect merger between them.

Let’s cut to the chase: I love this game.

UA is, I’ll be the first to admit, possessed of some flaws – but it bubbles with such creativity, originality, potential, and brilliance that it overwhelms those flaws. There are games which fail because of their flaws; their are games which are tolerable in spite of their flaws; their are games which suffer slightly from their flaws; and then there are games where the flaws are beside the point. UA is the last of these.

More on this in a bit.

THE SETTING

Unknown Armies is the Illuminatus Trilogy.

This is an analogy which I have not seen broached before, but the tone of the Trilogy resonates throughout the game. I don’t mean that this is a setting inspired by the World of Darkness with elements of the Trilogy incorporated into it – for that game you should take a look at the disjointed Immortal. I mean that when you first enter the world of UA it feels very much the way it does when you first enter the world of the Trilogy: All the half-crazed conspiracies and crack-pot theories and urban legends you’ve ever heard are true at one level or another, but in a way completely alien to anything you might have expected. For the first hour you keep thinking you’ve got it figured out, only to have the rug ripped out from under you. Even by the time you’ve finished exploring the place you’ll still find things hidden in the corners that’ll make you doubletake (or run screaming in terror).

The basics concept is this: Magick is real and the world is a much more unnatural place than your common mortal ever imagines. The only people who know this are known as the “Occult Underground”, sharing only the common trait that they all know “the truth” (or at least parts of the truth).

The Big Truth is this: Karma and Reincarnation exist, but only at a universal level. When the world comes to an end it is reborn in a way consistent with its karma – we get the world which we deserve. The mechanism by which this takes place is the Invisible Clergy, who unite into the Godhead as the universe is reborn, guiding its creation. Humans “ascend” to the Clergy by fulfilling the role of an “archetype”. Each archetype represents some primal element of human society; these archetypes are not set in stone, but are rather mutable from one incarnation of the world to the next. To make things more interesting humans still on earth can follow in the footsteps of ascended archetypes, gaining powers through the association. Sometimes an archetype can be replaced, but that’s a story for another time. There are other big truths out there (such as the conflict between Entropy and Order which drives all of this), but that’s the barebones of what’s going on.

There are three other important elements: The Unnatural, the Unexplained, and Magick (technically you could consider Magick part of the Unnatural, but its important enough we’ll spin it off by itself). The Unnatural are those things caused by otherworldly forces. The Unexplained are things which, at first glance, may appear to be unnatural, but in truth have rational explanations (these are fun because they’re red herrings which keep you from being completely comfortable – you can’t just dismiss anything unknown as being mystical).

Magick is one of the areas where UA really shines. It is based on three Laws: Symbolic Tension, Transaction, and Obedience. Symbolic Tension means that all magick is “based on some form of paradox” – a central irony or contradiction. For example, entropomancy (where you have to injure yourself to create a magical effect) has a paradox in that to gain control (power) over the universe you have to surrender control over yourself.

The Law of Transaction is the magical equivalent of Newton’s third law: Magick doesn’t let you get something for nothing; what you get out is equal to what you put in.

The Law of Obedience means that no one can follow more than one magickal path. This makes logical sense in the game setting because magick is driven by your personal convictions about how the universe functions – being able to follow more than one magickal path would mean that you were simultaneously holding two incompatible convictions about how the universe functions. It’s like believing totally and completely in both creationism and evolution; it can’t be done (you can fake it – but faking magickal discipline gets you nothing but fake magick).

Those may seem familiar to you, but trust me when I say that magick in UA is about as unique as you can get. Each school of magick requires some form of sacrifice to build up a charge and then you can use these charges to cast magick. The schools themselves are the unique part though – pornomancy, for example, requires to engage in very specific sexual acts (but not to take pleasure in them); plutomancy requires you to earn money (but not spend it); etc.

(A brief side note: Some have raised complaints about the magick system because an adept (one who can practice magick) can attempt to do anything. It has been insinuated that this means that those with experience are no better than those who are newcomers. Anyone who has actually bothered to read the rules, though, would realize a couple of things: First, the game assumes anyone playing an adept is just that – adept in the use of magick; if you want to play someone who isn’t optional rules are provided. Second, those with a higher skill in magick are capable of succeeding at more difficult magickal tasks and doing more with them – saying that they are “both the same” is like saying that AD&D possesses no differentiation between 1st and 20th level wizards because they are both capable of casting damaging spells, despite the fact that 1st level mages cause 1d6 damage and 20th level mages cause 20d6.)

THE RULES

The basic rules for UA are dead simple. But unlike many other simple systems on the market they don’t require GM fudging to fill in the gaps – these are a solid set of rules. Here’s the breakdown of the page and a half of core game mechanics – the shortest chapter in the book.

1. Roll percentile dice.

2. A roll of 01 is an extremely great success.

3. A roll of 00 is a complete failure.

4. If result is equal to or less than your skill you succeed. The higher the role, the better the success. Some tasks will need a minimum roll to succeed (so, for example, you’d need to roll higher than 30, but under your skill).

5. If the result is less than your skill you fail.

6. Matched numbers are exceptional results – either extremely good if it was a success or extremely bad if you fail.

7. In some cases (such as you “obsession skill” – the skill you specialize in essentially) you can “flip-flop” a bad roll to make it good (turning a 91 to a 19, for example).

8. The GM may apply “shifts” to your roll – changing the number you rolled. (A -10% shift, for example, would turn a roll of 50 into a roll of 40.)

Combat, as usual, adds a few extras. Most importantly damage is handled by adding the two dice together from your skill roll (if you rolled a 43 and succeeded you would do 4+3=7 points of damage). Firearms are a special case in which your damage is equal to your skill roll within a certain range (so that if you succeeded with a 43 you would do 43 points of damage, unless the weapon’s maximum was 40 or its minimum was 50) – hence a shotgun can do a lot more damage than a .22, but not always.

Character creation embraces the same standard as the core rules – simple, but complete (with a noticeable exception, see the note below). It breaks down into the following steps:

1. General Brainstorming.

2. Personality.

3. Obsession: What your character is very good at – the skill which defines who your character is.

4. Passions: There are three passions – Fear, Rage, and Noble. You create your own passions, each passion causing the appropriate reaction in your character when it is encountered (unless, of course, you can give good reason otherwise). Hence your character might be frightened of spiders, enraged at the sight of a child in pain, and committed to saving the environment. In addition to being able to flip-flop your obsession skill, you can flip-flop any skill when it is being employed in regards to one of your passions.

5. Attributes: There are four attributes – Body, Speed, Mind, and Soul. You split up 220 points between them.

6. Skills: The skill system is almost entirely freeform (see note below). Essentially you can take as many points in Body skills as you assigned points to your Body stat.

7. Obsession Skill: Pick a skill which is related to your obsession and make it your obsession skill. If you want to practice magick your magick skill must be your obsession (because unless you are devoted to magick you won’t be able to make it work).

8. Cherries: Cherries are “special effects” which are attached to the matched double results of combat and magic skills. This has caused some complaints, but when you realize that violence and magick (the unnatural) are the focus of the game it makes sense that these are the skills which are given particular attention. Nothing stops you from assigning cherries to other skills, per se – especially since the cherries are designed in a freeform manner.

9. Your Wound Points equal your Body score.

(Another side note: Several reviews have taken exception to the fact that the skill system is almost completely freeform – a handful of “freebie” skills are detailed and a list of suggestions is given, but nothing is laid down in a concrete fashion. Some have claimed this to be a weakness, but actually it gives a huge amount of power to the player in terms of finely tuned control over their character. Since everything is veto-able by the GM it can’t have any drawbacks except that you actually have to think about and personalize your character. Even new players find this type of system easier, in my experience, then attempting to pick and choose from a list of skills they don’t fully understand. I wouldn’t want to try it with a detailed, complicated system; but for a simple system like this it’s the perfect fit. As for the whacko who complained about overlapping skills – what drugs are you on?)

There’s one other important mechanic to consider: The Madness Meter. The situations you encounter as a member of the Occult Underground are fully capable of driving your average person beyond the bounds of sanity. A character’s Madness Meter keeps track of five distinct areas – Violence, the Unnatural, Helplessness, Isolation, and Self. Each area has ten “hardened” slots and five “failure” slots attached to it. When a character encounters an abnormal situation (such as someone’s head being blown off in front of them or their first encounter with magic or being held captive or losing all your friends or being forced to take actions which you previously believed you would never be capable of) they make a check – if they succeed they become hardened to that type of event; if they fail they react either with “panic, paralysis, or frenzy” (at the player’s discretion) and gains a failure slot. The more hardened you become the more extreme situations have to be to cause a check, but the negative drawback is that you become less connected with the world (and this has a very real game impact). If you max out any of your failure bars you go psychopathic – which is not to be confuse with riproaring insanity or any such stereotype. This is a subtle and evocative game, not a slaughterfest.

I like the Madness Meter mechanic because it never forces a character action, it merely provides a guideline. Like the rest of the game it is simple, but powerful and effective at reinforcing its designers intents.

ANALYSIS

Every so often I come across a game which is so amazing that it makes me sit up and take notice of who was responsible for designing it. Jonathon Tweet for Ars Magica, Robin D. Laws for Feng Shui, the team of Dream Pod 9 for Heavy Gear — these are a few of the games and designers which immediately earned my respect and appreciation. They are the designers from whom I would pick up a new porduct simply on the basis of their name being on the cover.

With Unknown Armies Greg Stolze and John Tynes join that list. Not only the simple, powerful masterpiece which the engine of the game is. Nor for the rich and original world which they have created. No, what really raises this game to the next level is the immense expertise and masterful understanding of the foundations of roleplaying design which they demonstrate.

Stolze and Tynes are masters. I knew I had something in my hand which had been designed in brilliance when I read the Definitions of Roleplaying which are included in the introduction (one from each designer). Tynes’ definition — improvisational radio theater — particularly struck me. I had gotten the “improvisational theatre” part down, but the “radio” bit was the simple label which had escaped me for distinguishing between the table-top structure and the live action structure (and, sure, you might be able to say “that’s obvious”, but you didn’t say anything before, did you?). They then proceeded to confirm my impression by laying down in very precise terms what their design goals for the game were – something far more designers should take advantage of.

And it just didn’t stop. Throughout the entire product Stolze and Tynes expertly provided guidance without falling into the trap which Rein*Hagen did in designing Vampire — formalizing their suggestions and guidance into rules. When Stolze and Tynes provide a set of personality guidelines based on the signs of the zodiac they put them aside into an optional box – a convenient shorthand for NPCs, a potentially useful tool for new players. Rein*Hagen institutionalized it into a set of necessary labels.

Indeed the entire character creation system is an excellent example of this – by subtly encouraging character creation with killing the creative process through formalization — but this isn’t the only place it happens. The chapter on Campaign Creation, for example, does the same thing for the GM’s creative process – encouraging, guiding, but never “mandating”. The chapter on “Running the Game” is actually a useful summary of rules which are gathered together in one place along with concrete examples of how to handle common play situations, not a hodgepodge of questionably vague advice.

Finally the layout is great – with information clearly laid out an important information emphasized and isolated for easy reference during gameplay. Although the artwork is occasionally less than perfect it is expertly crafted and placed. The whole product is rounded out by what I consider to be the the most brilliant introductory scenario I’ve ever seen.

And all of this brings me, regrettably, to the weaknesses in UA: First, several key concepts lack an explanation. Specifically the concept of “synchronicity”, the astral plane, and the age of hermeticism are all mentioned in relation to other things several times in the text, but never given a description of their own.

Second, the flip-flop mechanic (discussed above) becomes less and less effective once a skill has gone beyond 50. This is odd for a mechanic which is meant to reflect a character’s intense devotion to a particular skill or cause.

Third, the index is lacking, although this ameliorated slightly by a detailed Table of Contents.

Finally, a set of very simple core rules is marred in a couple of places by unnecessary complication.

None of these weaknesses are particularly serious (especially if you’ve read the Illuminati Trilogy for the discussion of synchronicity, played any pseudo-mystical RPG including AD&D for the astral plane, or taken a gander at Ars Magica or the World of Darkness for the general feel of what the age of hermeticism must refer to) – even the flip-flop mechanic is little more than a slight annoyance which crops up only occasionally and is still generally intuitive.

CONCLUSION

Unknown Armies is the best game of the year. If all goes well it will be remembered as one of the best games ever. If you don’t put down the $25.00 for this treasure trove then you don’t deserve to call yourself a roleplayer.

‘Nuff said.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Title: Unknown Armies: A Roleplaying Game of Transcendental Horror and Furious Action
Writers: Greg Stolze and John Tynes
Publisher: Atlas Games
Price: $25.00
Page Count: 225
ISBN: 1-887801-70-7

Originally Posted: 1999/04/13

In retrospect, was Unknown Armies really the best game of 1999?

Yup.

As I mentioned in “UA-Style Rumours for D&D“, the fact that Unknown Armies didn’t catch on the way it deserved to remains one of the great mysteries of the roleplaying industry. But when you look at all of the other games which have pilfered its pockets in the last decade, its importance and its quality becomes very clear. If you’ve never seen it, then you should really, really take the time to check it out.

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

Tagline: Who can resist a card game where you’re competing to see who can decapitate and execute the most people?

I have to admit that I sickened of the collectible trading card market before getting beyond my first addictive encounter with Magic the Gathering. After spending $70 to get a complete set of one of the early supplement sets I realized I had spent $70 to get a bunch of cards which, if WotC wasn’t actively attempting to rip off its consumers, should have only cost $15 to get and wouldn’t have created a detritus of cardboard. I also thought about how much potential enjoyment I was going to get out of that $70 investment and realized the money could be better spent just about anywhere else I cared to think about spending it. As a result of these bad experiences I ignored the card section of the roleplaying store entirely.

Ironically, however, it was Wizards of the Coast which brought me back over there once more with their highly addictive game Twitch. I am very glad they did this because in addition to the other three games in the WotC’s line of “family card games” this was also where my store was keeping the excellent line of Atlas card games (Once Upon a Time, Lunch Money, Spammers, etc.), but also all of the Cheapass Games. So, although I have not since returned to CCGs (and never will, although I am occasionally tempted to just pick up the starter decks – which would render them into normal card games for all intents and purposes) I have discovered one positive spin-off from them: They’ve gotten people experimenting with alternate types of games and they’ve also (re)introduced a number of mechanics which have been adapted into many interesting uses (notably the concept of having cards with unique instructions guide gameplay).

So when I picked up a copy of Guillotine I was looking forward to getting a chance to play it. I wasn’t disappointed. Here’s the basic mechanics:

Each player represents an executioner during the French Revolution. Your goal is to be the guy with the best bragging rights when you go back to the locker room at the end of things – so you want to be responsible for bagging the biggest heads around. The game is made of up three days. On each day twelve nobles are lined up for execution (twelve noble cards are laid down sequentially from left to right). Play goes around the table and consists of each player playing a single action card (if they so desire) and then taking the noble card which is first in line, so to speak. When all the nobles have been executed the day comes to an end. Each noble card has a point value and the action cards modify gameplay in various ways (changing the order in which the nobles are executed, effecting point totals of nobles, etc.). The goal, therefore, is to play your action cards in such a way that by the end of the three days you have the highest point total.

The game, it must be admitted right from the start, will never be addictive enough in the way that RoboRally or Twitch are in order to get a strong following of support. The concept is original and intriguing, but the mechanics (while being very good and providing strong gameplay) simply don’t grab you strongly enough.

The place where this product really shines, though, are the card designs. Illustrated by Quinton Hoover and Mike Raabe under the direction of Christopher Rush the cards are cartoony in style, original, creative, and (most importantly) funny. The action cards are more than amusing, but the caricatures of the noble cards are drop-dead hilarious, if you’ll pardon the pun. The Piss Boy card, in particular, became the favorite of the group I played with.

Overall I can say that I strongly recommend this game. Although it can’t be counted among the “best of the best”, it definitely deserves recognition.

Style: 5
Substance: 4

Writers: Paul Peterson
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Price: n/a
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: 1-57530-534-8

Originally Posted: 1999/04/13

Unlike Before I Kill You, Mister Bond…, which I reviewed around this same time, Guillotine still sees occasional play at my house. Of the other games I mentioned in this review, Twitch, RoboRally, and Lunch Money still get played a lot. Looking at my reviews for these games with the benefit of a decade’s hindsight, I’m actually quite pleased that I was generally fairly accurate in picking out the long-term winners from the short-term losers.

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

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.