My opinions of Tribes of Mother Night, by Better Mousetrap Games.

                I was pretty excited about getting to read through Tribes of Mother Night, by Better Mousetrap Games.  The setting sounded interesting, and it used the F20 System, a variation of the d20 System that I wasn't familiar with.  That said, I'll tell you a little bit about Tribes of Mother Night.  It's a fantasy setting, complete with magic and monsters, and revolves around the interactions between two peoples, the Haeloti and the Ehkaet.  The Haeloti are a numerous people, and are named after Haelot, the sun god; they more-or-less run things, in one fashion or another.  The Ehkaet, by contrast, are a nomadic people who have the unique ability to assume animal form.  The two groups aren't overly fond of each other (and, beyond that, Haeloti of different countries tend not to be overly fond of each other), and that's where the conflict comes in.

                As I've said, it's an interesting-sounding setting; however, the book, itself, doesn't really do justice to what it could have been.  For one thing, the text (at least, so far as the setting, itself, is concerned) is peppered with clichés, spelling errors, and muddy language, and generally reads as if it were written by a middle-school student who didn't bother to have it proofread or edited.  In addition, the text often jumps from subject to subject without any kind of transition, and the author doesn't even break the text up into chapters (to be fair, there is a fairly exhaustive table of contents).  Not only that, but much, much more could have been done to flesh the setting out.  As it is, the Ehkaet are very clearly the misunderstood, downtrodden protagonists, while the Haeloti are the authoritarian, corrupt, and prejudice-ruled bad guys.  It's interesting that, for a game that uses prejudice as a central theme, so many stereotypes permeate the setting.  All of these things combine to make a rather unprofessional-seeming product that isn't exactly easy to digest, or really particularly interesting to read.

                Worth mentioning, also, is the section dealing with the F20 System, itself.  I found no egregious flaws with the system, though it does seem as though some skills are far more useful than others, even though they all cost the same number of Option Points to purchase (Running, for example, seems far more widely applicable than Art Appreciation).  What really struck me about this section of the text, however, was the fact that the writing was so much better, and that there seemed to be a number of references to things found only in modern-day Earth, not in a low-tech fantasy setting.  There were numerous references to concepts like the Olympics, SWAT officers, the CIA, and even Wal-Mart, and these seemed pretty anachronistic given the setting.  Further, this is the only fantasy setting I've seen in which weapons like brass knuckles and police batons are given stats.  In short, it seems as though the entire section on the F20 System was lifted from another text and pasted whole cloth into Tribes of Mother Night, with very little consideration given to internal consistency (though, thankfully, there were no modern firearms on the weapons list).

What I Liked: The F20 System seems interesting and somewhat flexible, though far more complex than the standard d20 System.  In addition, the core concepts of the setting, itself, have a fair amount of potential.

What I Didn't Like: Sadly, that potential is never realized.  Far more effort is put into detailing the world's creation myth than into detailing the state of the world and its peoples.  The writing is some of the least professional I've seen in a published product, and the entire text lacks any real degree of polish.

This week I review 93 Game Studios’ Basic Classes: The Apprentice.

                I’m a big fan of d20 Modern; I waited eagerly for it to come out, I read the SRD while I was waiting for Amazon to deliver the book, and I read the book again when I got it.  Big fan.  As such, when I get to review something for d20 Modern, I get kind of excited.  Enter Basic Classes: Apprentice, by 93 Game Studios.  The idea behind this product (or line of products, I suppose) is that d20 Modern needs more magic, and magic needs to be available from first level (rather than circa fourth level, as the vanilla product is designed).  Apprentice introduces a new basic class—the Apprentice—that represents a low-level caster, apprenticed, as it were, to a higher level caster.  The Apprentice can be either arcane or divine—or, indeed, both—and gains some rather rudimentary spellcasting ability while advancing up its ten-level progression.

                I’ll start with what I liked about this product.  The class, itself, seems well-balanced with the other basic classes, and I didn’t really notice any blatant balance issues with it.  It gains a few spells by taking specific Talents, and can also gain some magical resistance and crafting ability.  The Apprentice is a very skill-heavy class (as I’ve always thought spellcasting classes should be), evidenced by the fact that it gains eight skill points per level, has an a full Talent tree devoted to skill improvement, and almost all of its bonus feats (with the exception of two) are skill-boosting feats.

                As for the not-so-good, let me start with what struck me immediately: the writing isn’t very good.  The author is prone to spelling mistakes, grammar and syntax errors, muddled language, and somewhat trite prose.  It may not matter to some, but I found that it detracted from my overall enjoyment of the product quite a lot.  The class, itself, suffers from a specific problem, too.  Though this problem is not mechanical in nature (as I’ve said, it seems to be well balanced), it does make the class somewhat less attractive.  Simply put, the class doesn’t have much flavor.  If you take levels in the Apprentice class, you’re going to get a few spells, or some numerical bonuses.  Period, nothing else.  I certainly would have liked something a little more interesting from a ‘magical’ class.  Now, granted, this may not be a problem for everyone; the main reason that it bugged me was that, aside from getting a few spells, I couldn’t think of a single compelling reason to take levels in the Apprentice class.  And really, if I wanted spells, I’d wait a few levels and go for the superior spellcasting ability of the Mage.

What I Liked: Good balance, and a skill-focused magic-user.

What I Didn’t Like: Sloppy presentation and an overall lack of compelling flavor.

This is a review of Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot: The Roleplaying Game, by Atomic Sock Monkey Press.

                After being on a steady diet of d20 products and World of Darkness for the past couple of years, Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot: The Roleplaying Game, by Atomic Sock Monkey Press, was like a breath of fresh air.  MNPR:RPG uses a very flexible, rules-light system called the Prose Descriptive Quality system, or the PDQ system.  The basis for this system is that characters have a number of Qualities that define their abilities.  These Qualities are roughly analogous to skills in other systems, except that they can cover a lot more ground under their ‘penumbra', and you basically make up whatever Qualities you want, rather than choosing from a pre-defined list.  The GM has final say over whether a Quality is too broad (or too narrow), but this system offers a great deal of flexibility (and creativity) to players.  The PDQ system also has the advantage of allowing you to generate characters very quickly; I'd estimate that, once you have a concept, it would take mere minutes to stat out your character.

                The game, itself, takes full advantage of the PDQ system's flexibility.  While characters are more-or-less restricted to being either a monkey, ninja, pirate, or robot, the restrictions end there.  Want to be a ninja accountant who uses a frying pan in combat?  Go for it.  How about a robot lounge singer with laser eyes and hover jets?  You can do that, too.  If you wanted to eventually combine the abilities of a monkey and a ninja, to become a monkey-ninja, the game allows for that, too.  And it's all very simple.  There are only a few core rules in the PDQ system, and a few more that are specific to MNPR:RPG, so there's very little opportunity for the rules to become unclear, needlessly complex, or broken.  Balance is left primarily to the GM to arbitrate, rather than the system, itself.  You could take a Quality for using a sword, for example, but if you're a ninja or a pirate, that's probably already covered by your basic Ninja or Pirate Quality.  The system doesn't prevent you from doing this, or from taking a Quality even broader than Ninja or Pirate; instead, it's up to the GM to decide whether or not something is balanced.

                Now, this isn't to say that MNPR:RPG is perfect; it's not.  There are a lot of mistakes throughout that could have been caught with more editing and proofreading, but that's not a major problem, and it doesn't really make the game harder to understand, as the intent is always clear.  The biggest problem that I see with MNPR:RPG is that it's flippant and frivolous tone, while genuinely appealing, doesn't really lend itself to more serious games, or to ongoing campaigns.  Interestingly enough, the book does admit this, and even goes so far as to devote a few pages to discussing how tone impacts the longevity of the game.  Points for that, by the way.  In any case, though, once I had finished reading the book, I felt like I probably wouldn't play MNPR:RPG too often, but I'd really like the opportunity to use the PDQ system for a more serious and ongoing game at some point.

What I Liked: The PDQ system is flexible and simple, and encourages creativity and evocative descriptions of actions.  It's designed to keep gameplay fun, simple, and (most importantly) moving.  The book itself is presented with a great deal of charisma and humor, which makes it a lot of fun to read.  That, and you can't help but smile when you read a game about monkeys, ninjas, pirates, and robots protecting the world from alien invaders and fighting over sweet, sweet uranium.

What I Didn't Like: The artwork was a little bit too simplistic for me.  And by that, I mean that it is entirely composed of black-and-white stick figure drawings.  Literally.  There were a few editing and proofreading mistakes throughout.  The biggest flaw is probably the fact that the game isn't really suitable for ongoing campaigns (though if you tend to play quick one-shots a lot, this might not matter to you).

This is a review of Notebook Essentials: Swarms, Stampedes, and Skirmishes, by Throwing Dice Games.

                I've always liked the idea of swarms in D&D.  Basically, a single centipede, or beetle, or mosquito isn't going to make much of a challenge, even for a single first-level character.  Pack a bunch of them together into a writhing, hungry, ten-by-ten mass, and you've got yourself a party, though.  And that's a swarm: a group of small, usually mindless, creatures acting as one, much larger, creature.  Notebook Essentials: Swarms, Stampedes and Skirmishes, by Throwing Dice Games, takes that idea and expands it in the most logical of ways: by applying it to larger creatures.

                The product starts off by going over the basics of swarms and giving a few examples.  It goes on to offer feats for swarms and special abilities that multiple swarms can gain when they join together.  Then it moves on to stampedes.  A stampede is, basically, a swarm of large quadrupeds, like horses or bison.  The book also covers skirmishes, which are a way to treat an out-of-control melee of humanoids (or other, similar, creatures) as a single creature, rather than tracking each creature's initiative and actions.  Both new ‘creature' types offer ways to run different, very hectic encounters with a lot less bookkeeping and headache on the part of the GM.  I even got to run an encounter with a skirmish just last night (a barroom brawl, specifically), and it did a good job of capturing the flavor that I wanted for the encounter, while allowing me to minimize the number of individual creatures that I had to keep track of.  Definitely a plus in my book.  The book also offers some spells for dealing with swarms (or creating them), and even offers a sample epic swarm: the skull swarm, which is a swarm of demiliches.  Nasty stuff, trust me.

                Overall, I'm pretty pleased with this product.  It's definitely a no-frills affair, weighing it at only ten pages (including the OGL declaration), with very little art.  However, it does have the advantage of getting right to the point.  The book gives you useful, balanced rules in a clear, straightforward, and easy-to-follow manner, which is more than I can say for a lot of fancier products.  It's not without its problems, but most of those are minor.  There are a few editing mistakes, the worst of which is an apparent copy-paste error (a new spell, greater summon swarm, seems to have been copied from the SRD's summon swarm; however, while the statistical information was changed, the body text seems to have been left the same).

What I Liked: This product expanded on a useful and evocative creature type in a very logical way, giving us two new very useful creature types.  The rules are clear and seemingly well-balanced.

What I Didn't Like: Not a whole lot.  There were some editing mistakes, but nothing major.  The skull swarm isn't really suitable for characters below, say, level 60 or so, and so it's probably not that useful, but I imagine it was probably included as a gag, anyway.

This is a review of Elements of Magic: Mythic Earth, by E.N. Publishing.

                I had heard a little bit about EN Publishing's Elements of Magic prior to reading Elements of Magic: Mythic Earth, so I was somewhat intrigued from the start.  As I read this book, however, my enthusiasm for it quickly grew.  Here was an e-book that was edited and proofread better than many print products that I've read, and with an interesting, flexible, and fun magic system that's pretty easy to plop into any modern or fantasy d20 game.  Allow me to explain where my enthusiasm comes from.

                The e-book starts with an introduction, as you'd expect, and then leads into a very intelligent discussion of myth, legend, folktale and superstition.  It not only discusses what these things are, exploring various types of myths, including the Monomyth and the Fellowship Cycle, but it does a very good job of explaining why myth can make a good game better.  This is not just a theoretical essay, it's a guide for breathing new life into your game, for adding resonance to quests that might feel somewhat generic otherwise.

                As interesting as this discussion is, however, the real meat of the product is the magic system, and it is very, very good.  Magic is broken up into a series of spellcasting skills—skills like Create, Attack, Illusion, and Charm, to name a few—which you gain access to by taking Tradition feats.  A Tradition feat represents the spellcasting tradition that you follow—again, to name a few: Stage Magic, Dreamtime, Necromancy, and Classical Fey—and give you access to certain spellcasting skills as class skills.  To cast a spell, you simply choose the effect that you want, including range, duration, and other particulars, and work with the GM to find an appropriate level and DC.  Then you cast the spell.  It sounds like magic might slow the game down, doesn't it?  It really doesn't.  Spontaneous casting, as described above, takes two full rounds to use.  To mitigate this, you can create ‘signature spells'; basically, spontaneous spells that you've created beforehand, that do the same thing every time you cast them, but only require a standard action to cast.  Thus, the flexibility is maintained, and the game is sped up considerably.

                Granted, the book is not without its problems.  There are a very few editing mistakes, and I can think of a few places where some errata is needed.  For example, the book explains that, in order to cast a spell of higher level than is normally possible, you must take Strength burn.  However, at certain points in the text, a different penalty (the fatigued condition) is referred to.  In another part of the book, a few Tradition feats are provided for standard fantasy d20 (the system is designed with modern d20 in mind).  However, one of these feats requires the use of action points, which are normally unavailable in fantasy d20.  However, little things like this do nothing to detract from the overall superb quality of this product.  Perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that I fully intend to use it in my own game, and I'm very, very excited about it.

What I Liked: Great writing, intelligent discussions, and excellent artwork.  Not only that, but the magic system is perhaps one of the most interesting, flexible, and balances systems I've seen for quite some time.  Also, for those looking for a little flavor with their crunch, there's a lengthy section on the default campaign setting for Elements of Magic: Mythic Earth, a setting called High Fantasy for modern d20.  It's well-written and very interesting, and gives you a lot of good examples of how to create spells via the system.

What I Didn't Like: Very little.  There were a few errors and items requiring minor errata, but nothing game-breaking. 

This is a review of Superior Synergy: Fantasy by Misfit Studios. 

Superior Synergy asks the question: why does skill synergy begin and end at five ranks?  It’s an interesting question, to be sure.  In a nutshell, skill synergies now have four ‘benchmarks’: one at five, ten, fifteen and twenty ranks.  Some are simply higher skill bonuses, while others allow you to use skills faster, or cause skill effects to last longer.  In general, the new synergy effects are easy to integrate, seem to be balanced, and are pretty useful on the whole.

            Slightly more interesting, but possibly less balanced, are feat synergies.  When you take certain combinations of feats, you gain bonus abilities related to the required feats, without having to spend another feat slot.  These abilities tend to be more potent than skill synergies, but not quite as powerful as true feats.  While they may seem somewhat unbalanced (and the author as much as admits to this), this concept is not without precedent.  In Wizards’ own Oriental Adventures there is a similar mechanic used to emulate mastery of a martial arts style.  Still, look at feat synergies with a careful eye.

            It should be mentioned that more effort could have been put into editing this work.  I noticed a number of spelling and grammar errors, though this hardly makes the book less useful as a resource.  Overall, I found this e-book to be worth using, and I plan to pillage it for ideas to use in my campaign.  However, those looking for something to add flavor to their game should look elsewhere; this work is almost one hundred percent mechanics.