OUT OF THE BOX August 9, 2004 By: Kenneth Hite

Speaking of undeserving, one might wonder why anyone takes seriously the opinion of someone who can't even get the name of the product right in a review. This is an excellent question, for which I have no sound answer. If I wished to roleplay the agonies of shame inherent in this dilemma, I could do no better than to use Hearts, Swords, Flowers by Genevieve Cogman and Alexander Williams, a very sound guide to shoujo anime roleplaying that I unaccountably referred to last column as Hearts, Minds, Flowers throughout. Cold rain falls, breaking up my reflection in the stagnant pool by the willows.

Lurks By Night
And on that suitably lugubrious note, we enter the nightside realm of Doc Horror and his merry crew, as seen in Oni Press' comic series Nocturnals, by the amazing, almost Expressionist, artist/writer Dan Brereton. T.S. (Skull & Bones) Luikart and Chris Pramas have now sumptuously served that series and its setting up for Mutants & Masterminds in Dan Brereton's Nocturnals: A Midnight Companion (159 page glorious full color hardback, $29.95) from Pramas' Green Ronin Publishing. If you are already a Nocturnals fan, you need this book; as Brereton points out, it's "the Nocturnals bible." You get a bunch of inside info on the various heroes -- Doc Horror, the Gunwitch, the lovely Halloween Girl, and so forth. In fact, the first five chapters are all rules-free setting material (the talented Rob Lazzaretti gives us a wonderful map of Pacific City) or art. Speaking of art, in addition to lots and lots of Brereton (especially sketchbook stuff, plus an 18-page comic exclusive), there's Ted Naifeh, Phil Noto, Casey Jones, Bruce Timm, and so forth -- the art direction, credited to Brereton and Rick Achberger, is terrific at pulling some seemingly disparate styles together into a seamless whole. The typography is brilliant, as is the layout; this is almost perfect, although the dense text on one or two pages gets busy. But that's just the mole on Cindy Crawford's cheek; this book is bloody gorgeous. And in Chapter Six, we get excellent rules and adjustments for grimming up Mutants & Masterminds, and in the next section, we get advice and well-thought analysis of the setting and feel. Finally, stats for the merry Nocturnals crew round out what is one of the finest licensed RPG books I've ever seen -- and one of the best looking, to boot.

Fear My Slim Sourcebook Stance
Blood and Fists: Modern Martial Arts (64 page black-and-white softcover, $14.95) from RPG Objects aims to restore martial arts to parity with guns in D20 Modern games. The core of this book is the intricate nesting of various feats -- martial arts styles, maneuvers, and ki feats (FX stuff such as hypnotic gestures and wuxia wire fu). New "master" classes (Contemplative and Martial Arts) open up "mastery" abilities, which become fairly powerful as the character levels up. (It would be fun to see this extended for monks in standard D&D; for "historical" games.) Other chapters add a soupcon of skills, some stats for traditional martial arts weapons, an Enter the Dragon style scenario, and so forth. There are only 42 martial arts styles modeled here, but author Charles Rice provides fairly clear guidelines for creating new ones. I, no stat maven, was able to build a decent version of pankration with this book, so if you're interested in an oddly underexploited subject (for d20 anyway), I'd say it's worth grappling with.

Dragons and Devils and Denizens, Oh My!
For a first publication, Jeffrey J. Visgaitis' Denizens of Avadnu (224 page full color hardcover, $39.95) is bloody amazing. Inner Circle Games brought this book out to introduce their "Avadnu" setting, and apart from the standard first-timer's nervousness with typography and dark margins, they've produced a real winner of a book. The art, especially, has a decent ratio of hits to crits; I don't recognize any of the names off the top of my head, and annoyingly the pictures don't usually have signatures. (Dude with the brown ink-and-wash technique is going places if he tightens up some, though.) The monsters, which include such wonders as Leech Bats and Saihars (globs of purple muscle that shoot "non-light") have a kind of Riddicky quality to them; the "look" is almost space fantasy or Dark Conspiracy, rather than standard fantasy stuff. The writing wobbles a bit, but the design seems solid enough. Each monster has a little story hook, and a specific section on how it fits into Avadnu, which is interesting, too.

Cam Banks and André la Roche do their darnedest as writers, but the real standout in the Bestiary of Krynn (159 page full color hardcover, $34.99) from Sovereign Press is the art, including a piece or two by an oddly uncredited Larry Elmore. (The Dragonrider on page 36 is everything that Larry's admirers and detractors believe about his work, simultaneously; I loved it.) The graphic design, by Kevin Stein, is good though not perfect; the organization (by Jamie Chambers, one presumes) is kind of counter-intuitive, but an alphabetical table of contents in the front prevents too much confusion. There are only 73 monsters, of which 14 are draconic, so you can't get too lost, anyway. This book is for serious Dragonlance fans first and foremost, which sad to say, I'm not, but the concepts are clear and iconic enough to translate. There's a very nice appendix on acceptance, for players of monstrous (or even non-human) characters; this kind of thing is RPG design gold. Plenty of templates add to that impression; I'm far from a d20 stat maven, so I can't tell you how broken or clean they are, but they look like good starting points at least. But man, that Dragonrider. Man.

The Book of Fiends (223 page black and white hardcover, $34.95) combines Armies of the Abyss, Legions of Hell, (both expanded) and part of the Unholy Warrior's Handbook with the unreleased Hordes of Gehenna, all buffed and tweaked for d20 3.5 as befits Green Ronin's high professionalism. Erik Mona, Chris Pramas, and Robert J. Schwalb toss up 130+ demons, daemons, devils, qlippoth, and other infernal uglies from three planes. The whole book shows close attention to detail and to the possibilities of the property and the OGL license that few publishers exhibit; for example, we get Epic-level extensions to the thaumaturge and unholy warrior, two new core classes, as well as to the infernal prestige classes. Small, but crucial. The infernals themselves are suitably corrupt and vile; the new Gehenna daemons are especially interesting, intriguingly tied to the sins (old-school Catholic Seven Deadlies, yet) of mortals. This could really jazz up a game; I had visions of a kind of Clive Barkerish d20 Modern possibility emerging as I read this material. The layout is good; the art is almost all very good, especially (of course) the wonderfully arch stuff by Dennis Detwiller. Fiendishly good, even.

Mighty Eldritch Monte
Monte Cook has done his own "sourcebooks assemble" bit with The Complete Book of Eldritch Might (222 page black and white hardcover, $34.99), which combines the Book of Eldritch Might Vols. I-III into a single tome, upgrading it to 3.5 (though not to the obsessive level that Green Ronin did) and providing Arcana Unearthed tie-in material. One of the great joys of reading Monte's work is the prolix nature of his imagination. "Why not a giant flying magic whale?" he asks. "Wouldn't it be cool if your axe liked you better if you hit things with it more often?" The result is like the best "older brother's D&D; game" ever, with bards who, like, totally sing their spells, dude, and a "mirror master" sorcerer with mirrorshade eyes, and, and . . . I cannot do justice to how cool -- scratch that, how kewl -- all this stuff sounds without sounding like I'm making fun of it, but my inner fourteen-year-old was dancing around the room when I read it. Yours will, too. I cannot leave this review without throwing out massive praise for the clean, spare page design by Peter Whitley, which manages to combine plenty of text with almost frictionless readability. This really takes the book to another level graphically, and goes a long way to unify the uneven art. Of course, any book that includes work by Kieran Yanner and Toren Atkinson will look good (Sam Wood does some standout work, too), but thanks to Peter Whitley, even the filler works. If you already have the three original books, you may not find this worth your dollar, but if one of your gaming pals gets it anyway, you'll be hard-pressed not to buy it too, regardless. It's that sweet-looking.

Castles Waiting
Apparently an expanded version of an originally electronic supplement, Brian Moseley's Fantastic Fortresses: Castles & Keeps (96 page black and white softcover, $19.95) from Darkfuries Publishing presents five fortresses with complete maps and NPC writeups (in both 3.0 and 3.5 versions). Despite the title, there's little fantastic about them, except Moseley's maps, which are architecturally precise. Although there are a couple of elves and goblins about, these could be historical medieval castles for the most part. While this will no doubt increase the potential utility of the book, it means they lose some flavor and distinctiveness, and some wild possibilities go unexplored. Note, by the way, that these castles aren't dungeons; there's no wandering monsters, few or no traps, and relatively light treasure counts. These are working fortresses, designed to be plucked up and put down for sieges or (maybe) ghost stories. Moseley has a good eye for castle design, though; what the book loses in sense of wonder it gains in sense of reality.

Twenty Sides Of Thrills!
I've already reviewed the original Storyteller-vide-Trinity version, so I'll go easy on the recap for Adventure! D20 (230 page black-and-white hardcover, $34.99), which adapts Bruce Baugh and Andrew Bates' brilliant pulp RPG to the d20 3.5 engine. The first half is the same as the original; an "in voice" horse-choker of an infodump about a world of 1920s adventure centering on the Aeon Society For Gentlemen and the mysterious Z-Rays that have created so many mesmerists and stalwarts of late. The second half (character creation and rules) has been adapted, with mostly felicitous result, by James Kiley, to d20 3.5. The single best mechanic in the new version (except for the car chase rules from Spycraft) is the creation of "Background Feats," which turn dots into feats almost seamlessly. This section right here is almost all you need for a Storyteller-to-D20 conversion. The other feats translate the old Adventure! Knacks, with decent results; the classes are good but not (heh) inspired bats at the D20 Modern version; they're more restrictive than the old White Wolf characters for sure, which is a shame in pulp. Dramatic Editing ("You see, when the plane exploded, I must have been thrown clear by the blast") is still here, as a tacked-on but totally essential system. (Sadly, it's not Open Content, but it would totally enliven any Barsoom-type heroic fantasy game as well.) The result: the first really good pulp d20 RPG, and almost a great second-generation d20 system.

So How Should I Vote, ENnie-way?
To bring things to a slam-bang finale, I'll real rapidly run through the ENnie ballot and indicate my top choices in the categories; you should check the webpage for the other nominees and honorable mentions. Unlike the Origins Awards, the ENnies ask you to rate each product on a 1 to 10 scale, with a provision for "never heard of it" to keep things honestish. I'm not going to provide a 1-to-10 rating for each nominee -- I don't do that in my reviews, and I'm not going to do it to kill a couple of paragraphs of space. (He said regretfully.) I will say that when I voted, I don't think I ranked any product below a "5" -- all the nominees I knew of were at least "average quality" -- and I only gave two products perfect 10s; BESM d20 Deluxe for Graphic Design and Layout, and Exalted: Sidereals for non-d20 Setting or Setting Sourcebook.

In the other categories (or at least other categories I know more than one of the nominees in) then: Best Art (Interior) -- Nocturnals; Best Cartography -- Fantastic Fortresses (although Redhurst would be a good pick, too); Best Art (Cover) -- Exalted: Sidereals; Best Publisher (Overall) -- Green Ronin (but Guardians of Order is a close second); Best d20 Game -- BESM d20 (although the fact that I never got an Arcana Unearthed review copy means this has a mighty big asterisk after it); Best Campaign Setting -- Testament; Best Rules Supplement -- Crime and Punishment; Best Monster Supplement -- Bestiary of Krynn; Best Revision/Update/Compilation -- Complete Book of Eldritch Might; Best Non-d20 Game -- Orpheus; Best Non-d20 Supplement -- Fantasy Hero; Best Non-d20 Adventure -- To Go; Best Licensed Product -- Nocturnals. There you have it; go thou and do likewise.