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Eastward Ho!
Well, it's review time again, and
the fun is just beginning. Soon the winter's drought will become
a flood of new products, overspreading the land and restoring the
fertility to the fields, and make of that analogy what you will.
I've just mailed in my nominations ballot for the Origins Awards
(since now I'm a member of the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts
and Design with the 10% off on Ramen noodles that my membership
entitles me to), which means that the public awards ballot is but
weeks away, which means that con season awaits us. But until then,
we travel -- east.
Drang Nach Osten,
Boychik
Medieval Russia must
have something going for it. Sure it may have been frozen solid,
burnt and looted by everyone with two ponies and a bad attitude
for a millennium, mired in the worst features of both paganism and
Christianity, and generally godawful place to live -- but it's made
some dandy RPG supplements. Two, in fact. I'm speaking not only
of S. John Ross' superb, superb, superb GURPS Russia but
of the newest Ars Magica release from Atlas Games, Simeon
Shoul's magisterial The
Dr agon and the Bear (194 pages, heartstopping Eric Hotz
foldout map, $23.95). My God, like St. Basil's Cathedral, is this
a piece of work. It covers the "Novgorod Tribunal," stretching from
Poland to the Urals in the Mythic 13th Century, beginning with the
Teutonic Knights and ending with the Mongol Horde, both of which
get full Ars Magica system treatment -- there's Crusading
Order Virtues and Flaws, and the Shamans rules are summarized from
that excellent supplement to let you play the beloved of Tengri
if you wish. And in between -- the Russians. Oh, the Russians. Deep
gaming; Russian pagan gods and their interplay within the Hermetic
spheres of Ars Magica; rules for playing the Volkhvy, the
Varangians, and even folk beginning with entirely different consonants.
Complete details for Russian faerie! Six premade covenants (which
I'd ditch in my game, but they're well done if you like premade
covenants)! City maps for Kiev, Wroclaw, Novgorod, and many, many
more! A glossary, and yet more beautiful Eric Hotz maps (and the
traditionally superb Hotz woodcuts, along with some rather good
art by, especially, Ralph Horsley). Between Shoul and Sjohn, Russia
may be the best-supported (in all senses) medieval RPG setting in
print; stick your arms in and see.
Not China, But An
Amazing Simulation!
Moving east, we come
to a familiar land, with a brutal Manchu emperor, brave Shaolin
triads, a Great Wall, and 64 magical hexagrams -- the land of Wulin.
Event Horizon Productions have taken the big step and decided to
set their "historical" companion to the slap-tacular Hong Kong
Action Theatre! in a China manque (the aforementioned Wulin)
rather than that Other Middle Kingdom. Although I can't help but
sigh that yet again I've lost the possibility of a really swinging
Historical China RPG to mine for life-prolonging cinnabar and magical
jade, I have to say that John R. Phythyon, Matt Harrop, and Allan
T. Grohe's Swords of the Middle Kingdom (324
pages, $27.95) is pretty sweet in its own right. Wulin is much closer
to China than, say, AEG's Rokugan is to Japan, and the use of such
elements as the I Ching for magic work really well in the wire-fu
high-action genre that Swords seeks to capture -- the genre
of such Jet Li (and kindred) classics as the Once Upon A Time
In China and Bride With White Hair series and the immortally
over-the-top Zu: Warriors From Magic Mountain. Although since
SMK is it's own game that means it winds up restating much
of the HKAT! rules system, it's not a problem, as that system
has been honed and tweaked for better wuxia action, and only takes
up maybe 70 pages total (which includes the aforementioned I Ching
magic) -- the rest is world background and fun stuff like monsters,
ghosts, bad guys and artifacts. The writing is clear and energetic,
and the production is pretty good for EHP -- relatively few typos
and a decent layout. The book is a Lightning-Print volume (in that
weird 7.5 x 9 format), so the art resolution is a trifle blurry,
but it's certainly usable, and for a wonder the screen grabs from
the source movies come out clearer than usual.
Little Girls Are Big
In Japan
China, I can fool myself
into thinking I grok. Japan? Apparently it just doesn't translate
for me. (Although I discovered a heretofore unknown ravenous taste
for sushi last year in California, so anything might happen.) Anime
has always made me shake my head and have a moment of "mundane thought"
(defined as "But why would anyone want to watch/play/listen to/read/obsess
about that?"). The very popular and no-doubt entertaining
Sailor Moon anime series is just one of the things I don't
even know enough about to know what it is that I don't even get.
Which doesn't entirely stop me from appreciating last year's Sailor Moon Role-Playing
Game And Resource Book (206 pages, including 12 full-color
art pages, $24.95) by Mark McKinnon, from his company Guardians
of Order. With a book this good, very little (even my near-total
incomprehension of the subject) can stop me liking it. Any way you
slice it, this book is a success. It's a slick-looking simple and
fast design (based on/compatible with/expanded from Guardians of
Order's Big Eyes Small Mouth and its Tri-Stat System). It's
a superb product for novices and beginners, to which it is no doubt
destined to appeal (and word on the street is that a whole lot of
young girls -- like 10 year olds -- dig this, an RPG of all things).
It's got lots and lots and lots of screen images and stills and
publicity art and character sketches and who knows what from the
various Sailor Moon series (including "art never seen in
America," it says here, although for obvious reasons I'll have to
take that on faith). And it has a 40-odd page reference section
devoted to the show that puts every other RPG licensed product (including
mine) to shame. All this plus notes on the "magic girl" genre (and
no word of Bewitched), how to run Sailor Moon and
similar games, and gender-switching rock star superheroes, too.
Er, go, Speed Racer! And I mean that in the best possible way. Now,
about that sushi...
And Into The Blue
Pacific
Where there's raw fish,
can malevolent squid beings be far behind? I sure hope not. Pagan
Publishing and its loathly Whateleyish twin, Armitage House have a chunk
of new product out on the shelves. Most game-related of all is the
second in the series of "chapbooks" for Delta Green; Dennis Detwiller's Delta
Green Eyes Only Volume Two: The Fate (108 fat digest-sized pages,
$15). This book deals with, well, The Fate, the secretive nest of
Evil Cultists atop the New York criminal-political power structure.
About a third of the book is The Fate, statted out in grand NPC
form (the Big Boss of The Fate, Stephen Alzis, not only has full
game stats, but three fiendish back stories, any one of which you
can make true for your game). Also notable is the detailed info
on the Federal presence in New York City, the squickily dark and
nihilist "play a near-certainly doomed street soldier of the Fate"
campaign option, and the cute ties to other Call of Cthulhu
products which I won't mention to avoid giving away surprises. (Speaking
of surprises, the fervid heat in which Dennis no doubt wrote the
book still shows through in the prose, which could have benefited
from one more edit -- it's still above industry standard, but not
up to Pagan Perfection.) But the best thing by far in the book is
the detailed writeup of clues and documents about The Fate and its
members -- 12 pages of property records, etc. that amount to a graduate
seminar in How To Set Up A Paper Trail For Your Conspiracy and Use
Library Use To Uncover It. That alone would make it worth the price
to Call of Cthulhu Keepers; the fact that the Fate are bad
mother (watch your mouth! Hey, I'm just talking about The Fate)
only adds -- well, even cooler injury to injury. Quickly; Armitage
House has released A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult (148 tpb pages,
$9.95), Fred Pelton's fifty year old exegesis of the Mythos and
the Cult drawn from HPL and (for example) obscure Biblical scholarship;
worth it for devotees, certainly, and for Keepers looking for tie-ins.
Chris Jarocha-Ernst's Cthulhu Mythos Bibliography & Concordance
(463 tpb pages, $27.95) is a vast and sumptuous triumph for any
true Lovecraftian. Wanna know where to find the Scarlet Feaster?
How many times people mention Kadath in the Cold Waste? What Mythos
stories Stephen King wrote? It's in there. Along with stuff you
didn't even know you needed to know.
Aiee!! Gojira Is Attacking
Plug Space!!
How can such things be?
There's no room left in the column to plug anything. That means
there's brand new Kenneth Hite books on the shelves that have yet
to see the light of daily pluggage in the exalted Webpages of Mania!
Such an insult is not to be borne! Plugs next week, then, along
with a hefty dose of More Reviews, including stuff from GAMA and
slightly before that, possibly including Good Reprints from TSR
and the Wolf.
previous out of the box
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