Ok, two things have been dominating my geek radar currently. Really, three things if you count 4th Edition, but the initial excitement has passed and my geek-out-itude about 4E has subsided into a general ambient hum of anticipation.

Monte Cook’s World of Darkness: I’m currently about halfway through this book, and I have mixed feelings veering more toward positive than negative. I’ll start with the negative and move on to the positive. First, the mechanics are seemingly designed to be compatible with 3.5, presumably so that you can use Monster Manual N to introduce all kinds of weirdness to the game. Granted, the “class/race” system is different and there are some interesting elements to the mechanical side of things, but a lot of the book seems sort of conservative for Mr. Cook. I expected more interesting things to be done with skills and feats, particularly after books like Arcana Unearthed and Iron Heroes (though the latter was, admittedly, designed primarily by Mike Mearls and not by Monte Cook). Skills and feats are more-or-less as they appear in D&D (with a few additions to account for the modern setting), and supernatural powers, while interesting in some cases, some to be mechanically sort of “blah”. One big caveat about this statement: I’ve only just now started reading about the magic system, and it seems pretty good. In fact, so far it seems like the magic system that should have been in Iron Heroes. I haven’t read anything about equipment, the changes to combat and such, or enemies, so there is a lot that I’m not yet qualified to comment on.

That said, there’s a lot to recommend in this book. Mechanically, the concept of “types” as a combination of race and class, combined with a “focus” to grant you skills purchasable at reduced cost each level is kind of cool. Some of the supernatural powers are also quite cool, especially demonic cants. The primary thing to recommend this book, though, is the setting. It is, in a word, awesome. A warning, though, to World of Darkness purists who think that the new line of WoD products is too much of a departure from canon: this is not the World of Darkness you’re used to. There are superficial similarities. There are vampires, werewolves, demons, and mages. Vampires are organized into clans and can get disciplines to grant them supernatural abilities. Mages cast spells. Werewolves rip things to shit. Most of the similarities end there. None of the supernatural creatures have a society that has existed on earth for thousands of years. In fact, vampires, werewolves, and demons have only existed on Earth for a single year.

See, a year ago these inscrutable, extraplanar beings called the Iconnu tried to destroy are reality and failed. Something about certain people (the Awakened) held our reality together, but the side effect of the Iconnu’s attack was an event called the Intrusion, accompanied by the Nightmare Wave. Strange things started appearing all over the place, and a large chunk the middle of the US was simply destroyed. The Iconnu knew that something had gone wrong, so they created servants to help correct the problem (the problem being us). They summoned the long-dead souls of evil human beings, which possessed living human beings to become vampires, creatures with two souls vying for dominance of one body, and a constant thirst for blood. They summoned feral spirits of rage from another dimension; these spirits also possessed human bodies to become werewolves, creatures of alien rage and violence. Finally, they summoned ancient beings of cosmic malevolence, who created bodies for themselves out of Earthly materials that they could shape at will. These beings are known as demons, and they are the physical incarnations of the Nightmare Wave in more ways than one. The fabric of reality was also screwed up a bit, which allowed certain people to become mages and work real magic with ages-old rituals. Finally, there are the Awakened: humans who hold reality together on an unconscious level, and who are blessed (or cursed) with the ability and resolve to detect and destroy supernatural beings.

So, pretty different, right? What I like about this approach is that the different types allow for very interesting roleplaying opportunities. Vampires are cool to play because you get to effectively make up two personalities for your character, one of which is evil. Werewolves are interesting because you get to play a sort of “stranger in a strange land” character who just wants to destroy everything in sight, but knows that doing so would be pretty stupid, from a survival standpoint. Demons are interesting because they are all irredeemably evil by human standards, and any demonic protagonists will be opposing the Iconnu for their own selfish reasons, and will still be irredeemably evil. Mages are fun because they’re wild cards, and because they’re capable of a wide variety of supernatural effects. The Awakened are necessary from a metaplot standpoint, but exist to sort of be a “default human” character for people who don’t want to be overtly supernatural. The GM gets some fun toys, too. The Nightmare Wave did all kinds of weird things, and effectively gives the GM carte blanche to drop whatever creepiness he wants into the game. It’s all pretty good, in my opinion, and I dig the idea that the apocalypse is happening now.

Bioshock: I’ve been playing this game on my PC for the last week. Again, there’s good and bad, but this time I’m pretty firmly on the side of loving it. The load times are ridiculously long, being a minute or more (though they are, thankfully, infrequent). The game experiences some lock-ups occasionally, simply hanging for fifteen to twenty seconds before starting up again. Not only that, but this game is easily capable of bringing my computer, screaming, to its knees if I play for a long period of time. It’s not without its issues. Despite this, I love this game. It’s easily one of my top five games of all time, it’s that good. I love the nonlinearity, the character development, the engrossing story and atmosphere, the combat, the moments of pure dread when I’m staring down a corridor and can see a splicer’s shadow cast on the opposite wall. The hacking mini-game is fun, and hacking comes with a number of rewards. I love that I’ve learned to scavenge a room from top to bottom once I’ve deemed it safe. It’s really just a fantastic game in every sense of the word, even with the performance issues that I have (and some of these, I suspect, stem from the fact that my laptop is now more than a year old, and that the video card, while still very good, does not get frequent driver updates and cannot make use of nVidia’s Bioshock-optimized drivers, despite being a GeForce card).

Zombies: Are you prepared for the invasion?

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 11:21 am and is filed under Geeking Out, Links, Musings, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.