Minireview: The Sixfold Trial (Pathfinder #26)
The Sixfold Trial (by Richard Pett) is the second part of the Council of Thieves adventure path, and is also perhaps the most un-D&D -like adventure I’ve yet seen from Paizo. I mean this in a very good sense. Looks like the first part, which promised more social interaction instead of endless combats, wasn’t just a fluke.
What makes this adventure unusual is that the PCs are expected to become actors and perform a play to a select audience of nobles. The reason has to do with infiltration into a noble household, but the play is the main event here. Since this is Cheliax and the court of a decadent noble, the play is far from safe… in any fashion. There is an actual expected death toll, and the PCs will need to scramble if they don’t want to become “acceptable casualties” in the process. Sure, the PCs might also decide to do the more conventional thing and do a ninja sneak foray into the household (more like “fortress”) in question, but that could become very tricky very fast. Being invited guests makes many things so much easier. To the author’s credit, the possibility of the PCs deciding to skip the theater part is mentioned… but of course, if mostly boils down to “well, in that case you won’t be able to use half of this stuff”.
As an additional fun point, the actual script of the (short) play is provided, so the GM/players could actually go through the thing line-by-line if they feel like it. Not sure how many will do that, but in any case including the play itself gets points from me.
It’s not all theater and woe, of course. The second half of the adventure is more conventional “sneak around and dodge traps and monsters” stuff – but even that is quite interesting, since the locale is… a bit unconventional. Don’t want to give up too many spoilers here.
This is a very strong scenario, at least it reads that way. If Council of Thieves keeps this up, it may just be the best adventure path so far. Or, of course, if might tank suddenly. For some reason, the lower-level stuff almost always manages to be more interesting, later on it usually devolves into a boring high-level combatfest. Most D&D writers (and to be fair, most D&D players) don’t really grasp the idea that you don’t have to challenge PCs just via combat – in fact, if the PCs are very good at combat you need to give them anything but combat if you want to keep things interesting. Exalted teaches you this, because challenging Exalted PCs with just combat becomes pointless fast. Other types of challenges, especially moral dilemmas, tend to work much better. I’m not saying “don’t do combat”; it’s fun now and then and of course it’s (still) the core gameplay of D&D (and yes, Pathfinder is D&D). I’m saying “don’t do just combat”… and that seems to be the direction Paizo is taking this one. Me likes.
Minireview: Scroll of Heroes (Exalted)
Generally, I’ve been liking the 2nd edition of Exalted a lot. Sure, the rules are a bit weird in places (I’d love a more functional social combat mechanic in the core, for instance), and the “crunch” of the game has more than a few errors and imbalances here and there. Still, we’ve lately gotten quite a bit of good errata on various Exalted stuff from White Wolf, and there are optional mechanics available to patch up (perceived) weaknesses in the core rules. Most importantly, the books for 2nd edition have been reasonably well-written and have contained tons of great game plot ideas etc. Some shoddy proofreading, the bane of White Wolf in general, has unfortunately always been a problem… but I’ve learned to live with that.
Well, every game line needs its clunker. To date, the low points have been Scroll of the Monk (with its ridiculously imbalanced “martial arts” paths) and the Dragon-Blooded book (with lots of charms that were obviously just cut+pasted from 1st ed and not given a proper think-through). And now there is this book, which unfortunately contains much more bad than good.
Scroll of Heroes is (in parts) a 2nd edition version of the 1st edition somewhat misleadingly named Player Guide. It contains rules for playing and running both “heroic mortals” and the offshoots of liaisons between men and gods, fae, demons and ghosts (the God-Blooded, Fae-Blooded, Demon-Blooded and Ghost-Blooded). It also contains Merits and Flaws, which can be used by any Exalted character. Sounds good, as such. But…
Well, let’s start of with the good. The beginning of the book (the “fluff part”) is pretty good. It talks about the game aspects of using mortals instead of Exalts, and how campaigns should differ. There is also some background given about the game world with respect to the various types of “mortals”. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book is crap. The Merits and Flaws are stupidly imbalanced; they are either totally useless (making you pay for abilities you had anyway) or are totally overpowered. Using these as-is in a game will seriously break things. And then we get to the rules for the various X-Blooded. Oh boy. Again, the “fluff” there is decent (mostly), but the “crunch” (i.e the actual rules) is horrible. The Charms again range from totally useless to totally overpowered (for a mortal character), and some of the mechanics given don’t even exist in this edition. It’s obviously a bad cut+paste job from 1st edition, by someone who either doesn’t fully understand the rules & setting, or who is under an overly tight deadline.
To add insult to injury, even some of the setting detail is.. off. Demon-Blooded are written to prefer “places of sin”, and to get mechanical benefits from that. Say what? Exalted demons do not work that way! In fact, Exalted demons are very, very different from “demons” in most other fantasy games, which is (imho) a bit plus. Sure, some specific demons might well revel in pain and suffering… but that’s far from being any sort of general trait. Here, the author clearly does not understand the assumptions of the setting. Places of sin, my ass.
Honestly, it might just be less work to write up your own rules for the X-Blooded than to use the mishmash given here. If you do decide to go with this, give the charm set a good read-through and be prepared to do some heavy editing… and really think twice before using the Merits and Flaws listed here.
I don’t say this about very many Exalted books, but: don’t waste your money on this.
Minireview: Silence of the Grave, by Arnaldur Indriðason
Icelandic murder mysteries aren’t exactly the most common thing out there, but Silence of the Grave (originally Grafarþögn) is still exactly that. It’s a somewhat somber affair. An old shallow grave is discovered near Reykjavík at a building worksite, and Detective Inspector Erlendur Svinsson is summoned to the site to figure things out. The body is obviously old, possibly from around the WW2 era… but nobody knows who it is, or even if it’s male or female. Civil book-keeping was in a somewhat chaotic state during the war years and the U.S. army base had brought lots of foreigners to the island, so there are no easy clues available.
The tale is told in two layers. One is the modern-day one, where Erlendur struggles with both the case and his troubled personal life – his ex-wife hates him, and his daughter is hovering near death after a dangerous miscarriage (and possible drug abuse). The other layer is an older one, and is a dark tale of domestic abuse. The two tales converge towards the end, and things start to make sense.
It’s not a happy story, but it is quite interesting; if for nothing else, as a view into Icelandic life both during modern times and during WW2. The writing felt a bit choppy to me, but I have no idea if that was due to the translation or the original text. It was ok and quite readable, though.
As an amusing aside, this book actually won the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger award for best crime novel of the year in 2005. The next year, that award was renamed and also respecified so as to exclude books not originally written in English.
Minireview: The Bastards of Erebus (Pathfinder #25)
The Bastards of Erebus (by Sean Reynolds) kicks off the latest Pathfinder adventure path, “Council of Thieves”. It’s supposed to be a more-or-less city-based path, so I’m looking forward with interest to see how this one develops; city-based adventures are much rarer in D&D -type games than wilderness stuff or the ever-present dungeon crawls.
The beginning is very promising, at least. The thing is set in the city of Westcrown, the slowly decaying ex-capital of the Cheliax empire (which has now turned to demon worship). The players are expected to be “concerned citizens”, ones with deep ties to the city and reasons to care about it – otherwise, the moment things get rocky the PCs might just decide to head off somewhere else. Which might make sense for the PCs, but would sort of kill this adventure path dead. It probably works best if the PCs aren’t too wealthy and don’t have connections outside the city. In other words, don’t have easy ways to flee or secure their own safety.
This adventure entangles the PCs in a resistance movement of sorts, one which wants to do something about the corrupt nobility which is letting the city slowly slide towards ruin. An initial incident forces the PCs to flee into hiding, after which it is assumed they start to form “ze resistance!”. So yes, like in all pre-plotted longer plots, some railroading is needed… but here, I think the smartest thing would be just to talk with the players beforehand and establish what you’re going for.
The adventure is pretty good, and is noteworthy for including a lot of NPC details. Not stats, but important things like personality etc, for people who normally are “nameless lvl1 cannonfodder” in D&D games. Paizo is clearly trying to push the normal D&D envelope a bit here, since this one is very far from the usual combat fest. Oh, there is combat,. but even that is of the interesting sort: the PCs are expected to stage an ambush, and are given pretty free rein with that and multiple (good) options. Nice, that.
This looks like a very cool adventure path, assuming the style stays somewhat like this first installment, with more focus on non-combat skills and social stuff. Also, the whole city of Westcrown is pretty nice as a locale… a city in a state where the state religion is demon worship, but which is still a perfectly functional environment for the inhabitants. Something like that could easily go in a stupid cliched “we’re evil, waaagh!” direction, but thankfully none of that is present here. It’s just a city, with a somewhat unusual structure for religion and law.
So… off to a good start.
Back from the EC
So, the VTES 2009 European Championships are now over, and we’re back from Palma de Mallorca (Spain). Us Finns didn’t score too well this time around (with a couple of exceptions), but otherwise the trip was a blast. Flying from cold, dark and drizzly Finland to warm and sunny Mallorca was a nice beginning, and for once the hotel actually did live up to expectations and pictures. The rooms were nice (our apartment suite was close to the pools), the food was excellent, the staff friendly, and in general almost everything went smoothly. The games did have a tendency to start very much behind schedule, but since I could spend that time sipping sangrias on the sunny terrace I didn’t mind too much.
I was already qualified (thanks to running the Ropecon tournament), so on Friday I decided to play in the sideline “Friday the 13th” tournament, organized by Tiago and Teresa. Was a lot of fun, though my Akunanse deck wasn’t quite up to the challenge; managed to scrape together two half-VPs due to two timeouts. The storyline rules did slow the game down a bit, so we had more timeouts than normal. Still, had a lot of fun. I thought I was packing a lot of combat, but the first round stuck between Matt’s Potence rush deck and someone else’s celerity gun intercept deck taught me differently.
Saturday it was time for the EC day one tournament. I picked my Anarch Cry Wolf Khazar deck for this… it has a lot of bounce, some rush, and I thought it might have a chance. Well, it didn’t work out, the day ended with zero VPs. There were a few close calls where I almost got a VP, but “almost” doesn’t count. In the end, the deck (though decent) wasn’t quite resilient enough and it was simply too slow for this metagame. Lots of powerbleed, fast votes (Panders etc) and other fast, brutal decks. Oh well. The games were fun in any case, and everyone was very nice and sportsmanlike. After talking about it, I got some nice ideas from Janne and other people, and have since tweaked the deck to be more efficient – dropped it down to 80 cards, tightened up the combat module, etc.
Sunday was the First Chance tournament, where I tried out my !Toreador/Daughters tap&bleed deck. Still not all that much luck, but things went a bit better: got 1 VP on the third round, and both of the first games had me with my prey at one pool. One is unfortunately a lot more than zero, but still… I’m pretty happy with how the deck performed in general. In hindsight, I probably would have gotten another VP if I had played my hand (a combo of tap cards, Freak Drive, and Siren’s Lure) a bit differently. I’ve since also modified this deck, also paring it down to 80 cards and hopefully making it run a bit more tightly. Will need more playtesting.
Janne had better luck, he was playing his deadly Fortitude weenie horror all weekend. He almost made it to EC day 2, which is very well done. On the other hand, lots of normally high-scoring Finns ended up at around my number of VPs (i.e. zero-to-one). Weird.
As traditional, I didn’t get all that much sleep. Usually went to bed around 2am after playing all day and night and drinking quite a bit on the side…. and then it’s up before 8am, in time to register for the next day’s games and eat breakfast. Still, those 6 hours proved to be enough, I wasn’t totally zoned out or anything. We played quite a few games with Team Denmark (great guys), with some of the games held at out apartment suite – we had a fridge, lots of salmiakkivodka & beer, and two game-worthy tables. Luxury.
So. Great trip, really felt like a vacation (despite lack of sleep and little real “rest” at any point). If was great to meet and play with lots of fun people once again (LSJ&Oscar, we demand that Imbued toilet paper!). Huge thanks to Ginés for organizing this, and to everyone else who helped. Meeting the Portugese guys was great, thanks Tiago and others! Likewise for the Italians, thanks Paolo and everyone for great company and fun games. Even though not everyone could speak all that much English (hey, my Italian is worse!), things worked out.
This was probably the best EC so far, for me. The sunshine and sangria helped.
Extrala brings us some VTES EC essential vocabulary, along with results and some pictures.
Oh, and Scott is a Cylon. Duh.
Minireview: The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi
With The Ghost Brigades, John Scalzi faces the daunting task of writing a followup to a critically acclaimed first novel (Old Man’s War). While it’s not quite as good, if only because we are now familiar with some of the ideas in the setting, it’s still pretty damn good military scifi.
As the title implies, this book deals with the “Ghost Brigades”, the “artificial soldiers” created by the Colonial Defense Force. Existing in a moral grey area, they form the elite troops of the CDF and usually keep their distance from baseline humans; they make “realborn” nervous, and they in turn find naturally born humans, even enhanced ones, to be painfully slow and clumsy.
Here the plot concerns a traitor within the ranks of the CDF, or at least someone who very much looks like a traitor. While the original person is in hiding, a mental imprint of him has been located… and the obvious next step is to imprint his memories in a new member of the Ghost Brigades, one Jared Dirac. The problem is that nobody knows which personality will become dominant, so while Jared can potentially provide the key to finding the traitor, he also runs the risk of becoming the traitor.
It’s a quick, entertaining read, like the first book. Interesting characters (with a nice twist on assumptions in the first chapter), some fun plot twists, and good action scenes. Recommended for anyone looking for good military scifi – but do read the first book first.
Minireview: Compass of Celestial Directions vol. V - Malfeas (Exalted)
As a companion book of sorts to the recent Infernals book, Malfeas details the “hell” of Exalted’s game world. It’s pretty cool. Some is updated versions of bits and pieces from 1st edition, while the majority of the book is new stuff. Like Exalted’s “heaven”, its “hell” is also very… nonstandard. While in many games hell and heaven are extremely abstract concepts, and if detailed at all are mostly populated by stereotypical and (honestly) quite boring inhabitants, Exalted is a game where the PCs can (and sometimes will) go to either and kick some ass – or at least get a chance to state their case and be heard by important entities.
Exalted’s “heaven”, Yu-Shan, is a magnificient bureaucracy gone mad, “led” by gods totally addicted to their Games of Divinity… in other words, actually run by and mostly for a vast army of celestial “civil servants”. Meanwhile, “hell” is actually the body of one of the defeated Primordials (now Yozi), Malfeas. Banished from Creation and forced to become part of the prison for himself and others, his rage is vast and endless, and sometimes he grinds parts of himself together in frustration – killing scores of inhabitants in the process. One of his souls, Ligier, lights everything with a harsh green glow. Another Yozi, Cecelyne (the Endless Desert) surrounds the Demon City of Malfeas in all directions (and dimensions). There is no way out, even for Cecelyne herself… unless someone or something summons from Creation, in which case the summoned entity must walk across the vastness of Cecelyne for 5 days, arriving just in time for the summoning. Time is not quite linear in this realm, and causality laughs at you.
The Ebon Dragon plots the doom of Creation while making plans for his upcoming wedding, while Adorjan, the Silent Wind, whispers across the city bringing silence and killing everything in her path. Hence, there is noise and music everywhere, in an effort to keep her out. Sometimes it even works. Kimbery, the Sea that Marched Against the Flame, laps her acidic waves against Malfeas and whispers to her demonblooded children in Creation, while She Who Lives In Her Name dreams of finally bringing order everywhere. Order of the static and final kind.
It’s not an evil realm as such (just like Yu-Shan is not exactly “good”). What it is is very, very alien. Sure, most of the Yozis would love nothing more than to escape their prison and to bring unending death and destruction to Creation… but they have been imprisoned for millenia. Cabin fever can be a bitch, especially for alien gods.
It’s a good book. It provides fun detail on lots of things, from the Yozi to their lesser souls and servants, to general life in the demon realm. It continues the line of keeping Exalted’s demons more alien than plain “evil”, which I personally like a lot. “Evil” is boring. “Alien” has a lot more story potential.
Minireview: The Final Wish (Pathfinder #24)
The Final Wish concludes the Legacy of Fire adventure path, and is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, it revisits some old locations (now greatly changed), which is nice and establishes continuity and the actions-have-consequences thing. On the other hand, it has the same problem that many (most?) higher-level D&D(ish) adventures have: it throws huge monster after huge monster at the PCs, in an effort to challenge them. For groups that enjoy combat this is probably cool, but I’m much more a fan of the Exalted style of challenging powerful characters – give them stuff that they cannot just blast away, give them hard choices to make, concentrate on social stuff. Oh, give the combat too, but don’t make that the main point. This module tries to do that a bit, at times, but it’s a bit too much of a high-level combatfest for my taste.
The PCs return to Golarion after an extended planar jaunt, and things have gone from bad to worse. In addition to seeing “their” own town under military occupation, it seems that some Big Bad is about to wake up. Cue fight scenes.
On the whole, I think the whole Legacy of Fire adventure path was a very mixed affair. The start-up adventure is excellent, and the pocket dimension planar excursion was also pretty damn cool (almost Exalted-like in feel at times). However, the background plot was very much in the background, and unless the GM explicitly spells things out, I fear the players could feel that they are just shuffled from one place to another with little rhyme or reason. There are lots of cool components here, but I don’t feel they quite fit together as a whole. It feels a bit incoherent. It might be that this one plays better than it reads, of course.
I have high hopes for the next adventure path, Council of Thieves, since it’s supposed to be more or less completely city-based. Curse of the Crimson Throne was also be supposed to be that, but wasn’t really (it still was the best one so far, in my opinion).
