The new season of the Shadowrun Missions shared campaign takes the storyline to Seattle, and this first adventure opens with atmospheric fiction as a veteran local ‘runner takes a call about a job and wonders which of the newcomers to town might be up for it…

The overall approach to structure is interesting. With the core use of ‘shared campaign’ scenarios being at conventions or other settings where time is limited, it is necessary to make effective use of the time available and the structure is designed to facilitate this.

Preludes. Some of my best memories of Storyteller games circle around Preludes. I could sequester away a player for perhaps an evening and, for a session, really get into that particular character’s head. Dice rarely hit the table. It was about motivations and character. I mention this because this eBook flirts with being a look at preludes. Let me clear that it isn’t, but even the author allows that some Storytellers will use it for exactly that purpose.

The PDF’s artwork is mostly good. In fact, there are some pieces within the file that are damned good (no pun intended. Really.). I personally liked Shane Coppage’s art the best (the cover belongs to this artist). The artwork proved a little distracting in that some pieces look like Hollywood was tapped for character inspiration.

The region guides for the Savage Worlds Hellfrost setting, with the exception of a couple which focus on non-geographical elements, comprise three discernible groups; “Evil” lands which have been overrun by the forces of the various villainous factions (the Liche Lands previously reviewed are a good example of this) and which are inimical to player groups; Border lands, such as the Freelands, where safe havens of civilization exist beside lurking dangers that threaten travelers; and “Civilized” nation states in the Hearthlands, where shadowy evil does lurk, but not in the same numbers as in the other places. The Magocracy is an example of the third category, and as such is a good location for WFRP-style Enemy Within type campaigns.

After a short introductory paragraph to set the scene, this pdf opens with a discussion on Social Hierarchy.

If you are a looking for a deep and philosophical game to explore the intricacies of your mind, then this is not the game for you. However, if you are looking for a light-hearted and whimsical romp in between long running campaigns then this game can easily fill that need. Early on the game touts itself as a ‘Beer and Crisps’ game (or a Beer and Pretzels game in the States), and it adheres to this easygoing philosophy.

One takes on the role of a Jerkian Warrior, a clone of the great leader whose purpose in life is to entertain the Exalted Emperor and feed the Exalted Emperor. It’s not an easy life being among the lowest ranks, and a gruesome (though entertaining) death is almost a certainty. One of the few ways to ensure your own survival is through treachery and betrayal of your fellow Jerkian Warriors; rank hath many privileges — one of the most obvious being fewer missions in which death is likely.

What is more mysterious than an Oracle? It is the turn of the Oracle character class to come under the microscope: no mere list of feats but a detailed look at the potentials and options available to players who fancy being an Oracle.

We begin with an overview of the class as a whole, discussing the salient points of an Oracle. It’s an interesting class, a spontaneous caster but divine rather than arcane (the answer to those of us who mutter that surely our deities would never let us choose the wrong spells for the day…), with many opportunities for the role-player as they tend to be good socially as well as with that air of mystery! Speaking of mysteries, your choice here sets the flavor of the whole character, affecting him in terms of game mechanics as well as laying the seeds for role-playing and characterization. As they are so important, there’s a thumb-nail sketch of each one, to aid your choice based on just what kind of oracle you would like to play. Oracles are well set up for defense, if offensive capability is desired crafty choices of mystery (Battle is good, or an elemental one) can prove an advantage. Oracles will tend to specialize in something, but that thing they can generally do very well indeed.

Region Guide 1: Sacred Places is the first proper title in a series of small pdfs for the Savage Worlds Hellfrost setting by Triple Ace Games. The guide is only 12 pages long, but is cheap, and adds more setting information to the game. The region guide series are not material that was cut from the Hellfrost Gazetteer, but additional material for the GM. In conversation with Wiggy, the author of Hellfrost and these region guides, he stressed that this was not an attempt to gouge fans, but to create additional material for certain areas of the game in addition to that found in the core books. When you look at the region guide series as a whole, you’ll find there are well over 400 pages of extra material in total, dwarfing the size of the gazetteer. Nor is any of the information in the gazetteer repeated here; this is all new material. As a personal note, I’d also like to add that Wiggy has made many pdfs freely available on the TAG website which also add to the Hellfrost milieu – hardly the action of someone wanting to gouge customers. So, why not just create a Gazetter 2 (and 3, and 4…) book instead of all these pdfs? The advantages of the region guide series are twofold; firstly, these pdfs can be released quite quickly; if Wiggy had wanted to wait until he had finished all of them before releasing them as a book, then there would be a much longer downtime before they saw print. Secondly, the GM can buy whichever pdfs he wants, depending on which areas he finds interesting or where his players want their characters to go.. No-one is making you buy all of the series.

The Hellfrost Region Guides are short, inexpensive pdfs (earlier guides tended to cover larger areas, and are 12 pages, later ones cover smaller areas and tend to be 6 pages) covering a particular aspect (usually geographic) of the world of Rassilon. In this series of reviews, I shall examine each region guide in order. The format of each is the same; there is no artwork, simply a title page with a one-column introduction to the area, then several pages of double-column information, some pages with sidebars. The text is clear and editing, for the most part, is average for the RPG industry; most region guides have a few typos here and there, but nothing too bad. As such, the Style points for each review will be the same unless there is something especially pronounced in a particular region guide.

The traditional print run of Mage: the Awakening ends with my favorite kind of supplement–the advice book. Although gaming advice is merely a click away today, some of the first useful gaming advice I gleaned came from the original White Wolf lines. Rather than rehash decades old thoughts on gaming, the focus instead turns to new ground. This book tweaks the core principles–setting, magic mechanics, and character–before setting loose some ideas on actual Mage chronicles. I’ll try to go chapter-by-chapter once I get the artwork out of the way. Before I do, one pointer: there is never a reason to quote Ayn Rand. Ever. Seriously.

For me, the book’s artwork isn’t very special. I do like the cover art by Imaginary Friends Studio; however, the interior art wasn’t engaging. It did tie directly to the fiction, which earned it a step up.

This is the third in a series of three reviews looking at the core books for Hellfrost, a setting by Triple Ace Games for the Savage Worlds system. In this review, I will examine the Gazetteer, the third of these three books.

This is my favorite of the three core Hellfrost books, as it can easily be used for any system, not just Savage Worlds. In many ways, it’s not so much an introduction to the regions of Hellfrost, as more of a GM’s Guide to Hellfrost, since it contains some information which might spoil the setting for players. The book is split into three sections, a short Introduction, the lengthy Lands of Rassilon, and the concluding Evil Organisations. The artwork is of the same style as the other two core HF books, and like the other books, contains occasional sidebars throughout that add cultural or historical detail. There is no system information in this book; it is entirely background information for the Hellfrost setting.

The Editorial opens with the promise of a great treat: Wolfgang Baur’s own home campaign is to be written up for publication! Apparently Kobeck is part of it, but the rest of the setting is now to be subject to the Open Design process and brought into the light of day. Wolfgang’s words show his excitement… now I’m looking forward to it as well.

And so to the first article, Ecology of the Gearforged. They started off as an act of desperation, Kobeck’s craftsmen and wizards collaborating to create something, anything to stave off the House Stross forces during the rebellion that saw Kobeck free – but they have matured to more than mere war machines.

This collection of issues, originally released between 2001 and 2004, showcase a variety of Cthulhu goodness, especially for those interested in modern horror. One of the organizations from the Delta Green line, the British occult organization PISCES, takes the spotlight. Since the material within the magazines are basically alike, I’ll tackle the trio together.

The artwork in the magazines comes from a collection of artists and are rather fitting for the Cthulhu Mythos. The first issue has a small amount of artwork (nearly non-existent if not for the well-crafted cartography within it). By the third issue, artwork fills nearly every page and yet doesn’t get in the way of the writing.

You can go many ways with a zombie. Desperate horror is just as likely as Romantic comedy anymore. They are seriously everywhere, which is probably why they are such a threat.

I’m not going to overanalyze them. People much smarter than me have already done that. What I will do is say I ran a super hero zombie one-shot for some friends once and enjoyed the Hell out of it. I also played a convention game where zombies were the main attraction (liked that too). For the most part (and this isn’t fair really), zombie games have a one-shot feel to them. Some games like Zombie Run (an excellent Savage Worlds adventure) and the zillion plus supplements for All Flesh Must Be Eaten suggest ways to make longer campaigns, but I always felt like zombie games were filler (like a blockbuster summer flick) than a campaign (like Walking Dead). I’m hardheaded and wrong, which this book quickly points out.

This is the second in a series of three reviews looking at the core books for Hellfrost, a setting by Triple Ace Games for the Savage Worlds system. In this review, I will examine the Bestiary, the second of these three books.

The book, not surprisingly, contains a plethora of monsters, archetypes and animals that not only help you populate your Hellfrost campaign with relevant beasties, but also offer some good fodder for any other campaign run using the Savage Worlds rules. For anyone using Hellfrost with a different set of rules, this book won’t be as useful as the other two core HF books, but it will give you some idea of the types of critters out there in Rassilon for you to convert to whatever game system you’re using. In general, the book is great for Hellfrost using SW rules, and ok for anyone using either a different system for HF, or a different setting with SW.

This is the first in a series of three reviews looking at the core books for Hellfrost, a setting by Triple Ace Games for the Savage Worlds system. In this review, I will examine the Player’s Guide, the first of these three books.

The book introduces the setting of Hellfrost and covers various interpretations of the Core Savage Worlds rules, offers new rules, and governs character creation in the world of Rassilon, as well as providing a very brief introduction to the world. The book is laid out in 11 chapters, with a good choice of art – just about every picture depicts something that is being mentioned on that page, from a woman buying a sword in the gear section, to a mage casting a Zephyr spell on the appropriate page of the magic section. The art is also of a decent standard, and in my opinion, better that that of the SW Explorer’s Edition book.

Fallen is Babylon is part of White Wolf’s Storytelling Adventure System, a series of well-tailored games that can be picked up for one-shots or slipped (most of the time) into a campaign. This particular setting makes no specific claim to line. It instead provides a town with a curse of sorts. The appearance is that the supernatural isn’t welcome. Vampires cannot sire here, Will-Workers find their abilities bleeding away the longer they stay, and, well, you get the idea. Of course, a mystery like this needs to be investigated.

Enter the players.

The Legends of Anglerre RPG (LoA) by Sarah Newton and Chris Birch takes the Starblazer Adventures iteration of the FATE 3.0 system and adapts it for the fantasy genre. This game strives to cover multiple subgenres in the fantasy milieu, with the focus on the Moorcockian swords and sorcery setting of Anglerre, and the high fantasy Hither Kingdoms. The source material for this game is drawn from a series of British comics that appeared in the Starblazer Adventures comic books. References are made to various characters and events from the comics and can at times leave the reader a bit in the dark.

The physical book itself is an impressive tome at just over 380 pages. The cover is full color and depicts three adventurers posing dramatically in a ruined building. The interior of the book is predominantly black and white with the sidebars offset in parchment colored boxed. The artwork is predominantly drawn from the LoA comics.

Beware of beautiful ladies approaching you in inns… or at least, expect spectacular adventure to follow! This lady seeks help in retrieving her inheritance, secured by her late husband in a dungeon under their house, the secrets of which he took to his grave. Needless to say, all is not precisely what it seems, and characters who take up this challenge will have to contend with two rival gangs of thieves as well as the perils of the dungeon itself.

The adventure provides characters with challenges both mental and physical, as before dealing with the contents of the dungeon they need to figure out how to get in! Interaction with various people, most of whom are not quite what they claim to be, provides scope for role-playing as well.

This is a fun little book (52 pages/no ads). I can see why it’s holding at number one at Flames Rising RPGNow Shop since its release. It’s a useful little bastard that gives canon material to what gamers have been doing since Masquerade’s end and Requiem’s release. I guessed it would be a book about translating the old system to the new, but it doesn’t play favorites. It goes both ways.

The first three pages detail the similarities and differences between the two lines. For example, the original line ran with the “we’re the Childer of Caine” speech where untrustworthy memories make any origin story suspect in Requiem.

Enter a world rich and strange – even the cover art suggests this even before you read a word! But it’s stranger – and scarier – that you might imagine. The opening piece of fiction sets the scene: a heady mix of warfare, implacable enemies, fighting machines… and yet at the core human beings, maybe a bit different but still real people who care, who love, who hate… and have nightmares afterwards.

Then Chapter 1 bids us Welcome. Welcome to a near-future alternate world in which giant mecha, magic, technology and unspeakable horror are melded together mixing That Which Should Not Be with hopes, harbored by all who go to war, that better times are just around the corner. It begins by explaining unfamiliar terms, both those of role-playing and those specifically for this setting. Now obscure references in the opening fiction become clear – not, alas, the sidebar text, small black text on a strident and messy dark pink background is not conducive to clarity: rather a shock in a work where excellent design is otherwise evident. Many of the references are familiar if you happen to read Lovecraft – Cthulhu himself, and many of the cults and dark gods that lurk around – and others if you care for anime and mecha in general.

Signs of the Moon takes a look at one of the few aspects (pun intended) I love about the Werewolf (both of them) lines. The Auspices appeal to me because it always seemed realistic, as realistic as a game about shapeshifters can be. People are pulled by the moon in ways we barely understand. Just as sure as a hot August day can statistically cause a homicide rate to rise, the moon too plays a role in our little dramas. Why not write a book about it? This is a hefty 227 pages of new gifts, rules, filler and more.

The artwork to the book keeps to the feel of the line. It’s a visceral, tribal style that is so much stronger than what the original line offered. My personal fave is on page 207. I usually shy away from talking about layout in a White Wolf book because, well, they set the standard for high quality.