The Legends of Anglerre RPG (LoA) by Sarah Newton and Chris Birch takes the Starblazer Adventures iteration of the FATE 3.0 system and adapts it for the fantasy genre. This game strives to cover multiple subgenres in the fantasy milieu, with the focus on the Moorcockian swords and sorcery setting of Anglerre, and the high fantasy Hither Kingdoms. The source material for this game is drawn from a series of British comics that appeared in the Starblazer Adventures comic books. References are made to various characters and events from the comics and can at times leave the reader a bit in the dark.

The physical book itself is an impressive tome at just over 380 pages. The cover is full color and depicts three adventurers posing dramatically in a ruined building. The interior of the book is predominantly black and white with the sidebars offset in parchment colored boxed. The artwork is predominantly drawn from the LoA comics.

Beware of beautiful ladies approaching you in inns… or at least, expect spectacular adventure to follow! This lady seeks help in retrieving her inheritance, secured by her late husband in a dungeon under their house, the secrets of which he took to his grave. Needless to say, all is not precisely what it seems, and characters who take up this challenge will have to contend with two rival gangs of thieves as well as the perils of the dungeon itself.

The adventure provides characters with challenges both mental and physical, as before dealing with the contents of the dungeon they need to figure out how to get in! Interaction with various people, most of whom are not quite what they claim to be, provides scope for role-playing as well.

This is a fun little book (52 pages/no ads). I can see why it’s holding at number one at Flames Rising RPGNow Shop since its release. It’s a useful little bastard that gives canon material to what gamers have been doing since Masquerade’s end and Requiem’s release. I guessed it would be a book about translating the old system to the new, but it doesn’t play favorites. It goes both ways.

The first three pages detail the similarities and differences between the two lines. For example, the original line ran with the “we’re the Childer of Caine” speech where untrustworthy memories make any origin story suspect in Requiem.

Enter a world rich and strange – even the cover art suggests this even before you read a word! But it’s stranger – and scarier – that you might imagine. The opening piece of fiction sets the scene: a heady mix of warfare, implacable enemies, fighting machines… and yet at the core human beings, maybe a bit different but still real people who care, who love, who hate… and have nightmares afterwards.

Then Chapter 1 bids us Welcome. Welcome to a near-future alternate world in which giant mecha, magic, technology and unspeakable horror are melded together mixing That Which Should Not Be with hopes, harbored by all who go to war, that better times are just around the corner. It begins by explaining unfamiliar terms, both those of role-playing and those specifically for this setting. Now obscure references in the opening fiction become clear – not, alas, the sidebar text, small black text on a strident and messy dark pink background is not conducive to clarity: rather a shock in a work where excellent design is otherwise evident. Many of the references are familiar if you happen to read Lovecraft – Cthulhu himself, and many of the cults and dark gods that lurk around – and others if you care for anime and mecha in general.

Signs of the Moon takes a look at one of the few aspects (pun intended) I love about the Werewolf (both of them) lines. The Auspices appeal to me because it always seemed realistic, as realistic as a game about shapeshifters can be. People are pulled by the moon in ways we barely understand. Just as sure as a hot August day can statistically cause a homicide rate to rise, the moon too plays a role in our little dramas. Why not write a book about it? This is a hefty 227 pages of new gifts, rules, filler and more.

The artwork to the book keeps to the feel of the line. It’s a visceral, tribal style that is so much stronger than what the original line offered. My personal fave is on page 207. I usually shy away from talking about layout in a White Wolf book because, well, they set the standard for high quality.

White Wolf Publishing seems to have covered everything possible for Vampire the Requiem; it helps they had a previous edition of the RPG – Vampire the Masquerade – to hash out what players though was useful and what they didn’t want. Along comes a small tidbit like Invite Only, and I for one am left wondering “Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?”

Written by David A. Hill Jr. and Chuck Wendig, Invite Only is a guide to parties — more specifically, parties hosted or attended by the Kindred. Besides giving the less combat-oriented Kindred something interesting to do, parties are also the focus of a lot of deals and surprises in the V:tR world. A Kindred who pays attention could learn a lot at a party – if she survives long enough to make use of this knowledge.

The alchemist has been knocking around the fringes of fantasy games for ages, generally – if codified at all – as an NPC that your characters can go to for a range of useful items to take on their adventures, with alchemy itself as a sideline skill practiced in your ‘Craft’ spot. Now Paizo’s Advanced Player’s Guide has brought him out of the workshop to become a playable character in his own right, with skills useful down the dungeon or out on the road, and this product seeks to expand on this and make him an even more attractive option.

The alchemist PC has several notable skills, which are mentioned in the Introduction – he can throw bombs, make and use extracts, brew potions and use poison. However, to hone such a character, he needs appropriate feats and here a grand total of 30 are presented for the budding alchemist to choose from.

Benjamin Baugh’s Savaged edition of The Kerberos Club is one of the more imaginative settings I’ve seen for the engine in awhile. The setting couples super heroes with Victorian England. It’s really a game for fans of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic of course, not the movie). Beginning in 1860, superhumans begin cropping up (or flying about in this case). The public is understandably weary of such, so factions quickly form. The superhumans come in all flavors. There are mystically created heroes, Mystery Men of Science, and more. The 300-page corebook, while meaty, still requires both the Savage Worlds corebook and Savage Worlds Superpowers Companion to play.

The Dresden Files RPG (DFRPG) by Evil Hat Productions is their adaptation of the FATE 3.0 system to the world created by Jim Butcher in his novels. While not required reading to play the game, a brief overview of the novels will be helpful, as no such summary is included in the game, with that in mind, there are mild spoilers throughout. The novels are chiefly concerned with the cases taken by a private investigator who is also a wizard. He solves various crimes in the city of Chicago that have an occult connection. The writers of the RPG have done an excellent job of using an established intellectual property as a baseline setting and not allowing the characters from the novel to overwhelm the game, a situation that has hurt other settings in the past.

The book itself is a large volume at just over 400 pages. The cover is a full wrap around image depicting Harry Dresden, Karrin Murphy and Michael Carpenter doing battle against a host of supernatural foes. The interior of the book consists of full color pages that are printed to appear as if a coil bound notebook. This appearance is due to the fact that the game is framed in such a way that it appears to be a manuscript of the game written by one of the characters from the series of novels. This stylistic choice is furthered by the inclusion of marginalia written by the “author,” a werewolf named Will, Harry Dresden and Bob, a spirit assistant to Dresden.

The introduction to this adventure provides an apposite reminder: in a game in which dynasties and bloodlines and the good of your House feature large, weddings are going to be very important events indeed. For players of the game of thrones, dynastic alliances are often sealed by a marriage, whilst the young may still harbor hopes of marrying for love rather than political advantage. Even if you are not getting wed yourself, there is plenty of scope during such an event to further your own ends as well as enjoy a good party!

So is the case with the wedding central to this adventure. Two minor houses are sealing recent agreement through marriage, having for many years been at odds with each other. One party is happy, affection having conveniently coincided with policy, but the other party has other ideas…

You might think that it was bad enough to be locked up on an automated spaceship and sent off on a one-way journey to an unknown destination in the company of people even nastier than yourself… but that’s only the start of it. Science-fiction meets horror meets prison drama in this game – and digging a tunnel to freedom is not an option.

Chapter 1: History sets the scene, explaining the political, historical and societal changes on Earth that have led to the development of this rather drastic solution to the age-old question of what do you do with those people too mad, bad or inconvenient to fit in to normal society. Based on rather dodgy psychological theory, people were assessed for their potential to commit violent crime and those deemed most likely to become violent got locked away before they even had a chance to do something wrong.

What do you give the Savage Worlds’ character who has everything? In an earlier review, I suggested Suzerain, which permits players to take their characters to the demigod level and opens up, well, all the other game books on the bookshelf at home. This is becoming quite the trend as massive gaming collections fail to the get love they deserve. Eden’s under-appreciated Odyssey Prime tried this (with D20 and Unisystem no less). John Wick has an interesting take on it with his Flux game while Suzerain tries to work from one system (Savage Worlds) to make all the setting fit into place. The designers at Savage Mojo could have stopped with the core book, leaving readers to fend for themselves; however, they instead have created a series of settings intended for demigod powerhouses. To paraphrase the game, fighting a few vampires is good work for a hero. Fighting an army of vampires is what you get when you attain Suzerain status.

The underlying concept to this game seems simple: you set up a situation in which things will go wrong, disastrously so, and then play it out as a collaborative story-telling game, taking the part of the main protagonists. That’s straightforward enough, but bolted on is a complex resolution mechanic that jolts you out of storytelling mode to administer – while giving structure to what could otherwise dissolve into chaos around the game-table (as opposed to in the situation you’re playing, where you WANT chaos!) it detracts from the interactive no-holds-barred narrative flow of the game.

Designed for 3-5 players (no GM required) and to take about three hours to play out, even the design process is very structured. Called The Setup, you start by determining when and where the game will take place, and then insert relationships and details to engineer your situation. But it’s not done by purely throwing out ideas until your mix feels explosive enough to begin, but through a system called a Playset. As a scenario-design system, it’s quite a beautiful mix of creativity and randomization. Each Playset comes with lists, you see, and once you have chosen a published one or made up your own, you roll a whole bunch of dice and take turns to choose items from the lists, each time using a die that’s rolled the appropriate number.

There are several ‘post-apocalypse’ games around, even ones using the D20 ruleset, so what sets this one apart? The Introduction sets out the underlying philosophy: Man is a destructive beast, and it’s not unlikely that sometime he’ll nearly pound himself out of existence, very likely by mistake. The rot set in during the Second World War, when research led to the first atomic bombs, and continued with other scientific ‘advances’ until the calamity that sets the scene for this game. Taking a date prophesied by the Mayans as marking the end of the current age, 21 December 2012, a rapidly-escalating nuclear exchange is postulated, leading to an ‘exodus’ of survivors seeking safety in underground shelters from which they have finally emerged some twenty years later.

The vampires of White Wolf’s World of Darkness are consummate predators. Predators – generally speaking – don’t often suffer the company of other predators, particularly those that compete for the same food source, and rarely willingly when it does happen. One of the few things that encourages vampires to interact with each other is affiliation within a covenant. Such affiliations tend – by the very nature of their members – to be relatively loose ties, but they are not fleeting; vampires in the World of Darkness take a very dim view of those who willingly sever their connection to their covenant-mates. In The Invictus, White Wolf takes a look at the feudalistic covenant envied by many and hated by most – even by some of those within.

The book opens with a rambling foreword by the author, touching on how this is a complete rewrite – as the translation of the original I’m reading is of the 2nd edition of Rêve de Dragon – of the rules, suggesting the order and way in which it should be read and the like, before getting to the underlying philosophy of the game: that a dream exists only whilst the dreamer is dreaming… and that in similar vein, the alternate reality of a role-playing game only comes to life when someone is playing that game. The aim in creating the game is to provide a ruleset that facilitates the shared dream of the in-game reality.

The whole is divided into three books, the first of which is called Journeyers. For this game is about journeys: be they quests, searches for enlightenment or indeed actual travels. It begins with the rules for creating a character, or Journeyer. Each is described by a comprehensive list of 18 characteristics, assigned in the main by point-buy, as well as skills and other attributes. Interestingly, the details of actually acquiring skills and the like are left until later despite a fairly comprehensive outline of how a character is described mechanically, the discussion then moves on to the crux of this ruleset, the resolution table, which is brought into use whenever it is not clear whither an action will succeed or not.

It’s a delightful conceit – a ‘virtual boxed set’ – harking back to the cardboard boxes that used to contain much of one’s gaming treasures… and this too is full of treasure, namely all eight parts of 0one’s Dungeon of Terror mapset with a few bonus goodies as well: a big DM’s map, random encounter tables and template pages on which you can record your notes about the various rooms. If you want to use the dungeon entire, this is well worth acquiring.

The eight parts of the mapset, which are also available separately if you have already decided that you only require a part of this vast complex, are presented as separate PDF files in your download, as are the three bonus items… and a JPEG image which is the one that appears in product advertising (I’d have liked a larger one of just the ‘box lid’ art to use as cover to a folder or even in on a hand-made box to make it a REAL boxed set!).

I’ve been waiting eagerly for the re-release of the Dark Sun Campaign Setting for a long time – since the early days of 3rd Edition, actually. Why? It’s an amazingly different world in comparison to the somewhat same old and tired fantasy settings out there. But, D&D 3e came and went and Dark Sun languished in some dark corner of the WotC offices – probably collecting dust next to Planescape – forgotten and dejected. I honestly didn’t think I’d ever see this world in print again, but after a decade and half, Wizards of the Coast finally came through with a completely revitalized 4th Edition Athas.

If you haven’t been playing D&D forever and half or just never tried Dark Sun back in its heyday, let me tell you a little bit about what this setting has it store for you. Dark Sun has a very different feel than other settings you may have ever tried.

The module itself is 32 pages long, printed in full color on what feels like good quality paper. There are a total of thirteen encounters presented in the nice one to two page format that has become customary in 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons supplements. Also included is an eight page foldout battle-mat of the town with a crumbling old mansion on the reverse side. There is very little in the way of artwork beyond the cover art and the encounter maps, unfortunately, and there are no handouts or props aside from the battle-mat. Although, I must say as someone who is incredibly horrible at drawing on a battle grid, I really appreciate having one included with the adventure.

A good PDF should be more than just a scanned version of a book. Okay, so many of them are laced with hyperlinks and bookmarks, which are great. Some PDF releases really explore the potential behind pure digital media.

When the second edition of Vampire: the Masquerade came out, I didn’t care about the Tremere at all. They were, to me, an excuse to make sure yet another RPG had a wizard hidden within it.