Wolfsheim is a mini-adventure for Scion, stand alone, suitable for an evening’s play or as a pick-up or convention game, though it will need experienced characters to be pre-generated in such an instance. It’s fairly straightforward, if a little rail-roady (as most of these adventures from White Wolf have been) and it could easily be shifted in space and time from its modern, Germanic setting to just about anywhere or anywhen.

The basic storyline is that of Yojimbo, the famous Japanese samurai story, a town caught between two predatory groups and the wanderers coming in, upsetting the balance between the people and their antagonists and, hopefully, causing a new peace to come about (through a great deal of bloodshed in the middle).

Part Four of the Scion companion is ‘Secrets of the World’ which is a rather grandiose name for what amounts to a grab bag of things that didn’t really fit into the other sections. This is the fourth in a series of ‘peeks’ at the Scion Companion which is coming to print to support the main line and is much mroe general – and therefore generally useful – than some of the other previews.

This is a toolkit of ideas, devices, groups and guidelines and as such represents the real ‘meat’ of the Scion Companion. If this is what you like from your supplementary material than buying just this companion on PDF could represent a real bargain if the other sections of the book don’t appeal so much.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Ragnarok is an expansion and adventure book by White Wolf for Scion. The book deals with the apocalypse myth, specifically of the Norse gods and, being apocalyptic, returns to many of the tropes of the oWoD. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it makes almost as bad a hash of it as the end times books of the old World of Darkness did, though it has many redeeming qualities as a publication.

Ragnarok is a hefty book at some 244 pages, not a bad size for a core book, let alone a supplement, continuing a tradition of ‘fat splats’ which has overtaken whole swathes of the gaming industry. The book is divided into two key sections and these are further subdivided into their own segments.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The PDF opens with fiction to set the mood. While written well, the white text in a scripty font was pretty hard to read on a black background, so I missed a lot of the details. The first section dives right into discussion cross-pantheon politics with commonalities broken out. This is a very useful section for Storytellers because it offers a high-level overview of how the Atzlanti philosophy works versus the Pesedjet that they can use in and out of game. I really like sections like this one in game supplements because it helps water down conflicting ideas and offer ideas for players to work together in a game. Sometimes, finding common ground when your characters come from different pantheons can be a challenge.

Children Are Our Future
Before the Visitation of a Scion’s divine parent, the Scion in question is mortal, and as vulnerable to physical, mental and emotional danger as any other child. Yet they are also potential sources of great power, and (to those who might be able to identify them as such) prospective pawns.
Someone has developed [...]

The End Is Nigh!
Fimbulwinter has come. The wolf Fenrir runs free, and the serpent Jörmungandr has loosed Midgard from his coils. The twilight of the Gods has begun, and only the Scions of the Aesir can salvage some good from the conflagration to come. Will your character survive the final battle of order versus chaos, [...]

The old woman totters off to enjoy her breakfast, as tiny drops of bile patter on the street behind her.

People are turning up dead with their organs missing, but there’s no evidence of scars or surgery. The deaths are clearly unusual and perhaps even supernatural, and when one victim dies right in front of the hunters, their involvement becomes crucial. While the hunters may at first believe they are simply tracking down a monster, their investigations soon reveal a pattern to the killings, which implies some guiding intellect behind the travesties.

A story in the Storytelling Adventure System for Hunter: The Vigil.

Spearfinger is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

White Wolf and RPGNow have made a new PDF offering available today. This week delve into the Epic Fantasy with the Jewel of the Scavenger Lands bundle for Exalted.

Forged from the shattered remains of the Dragon-Blooded Shogunate and tempered in the fires of war, the so-called Scavenger Lands continue to stand in defiance of the tyranny of the Realm, as they have done for eight centuries. Ranging from mighty Lookshy in the west to the eclectic Hundred Kingdoms in the east, the states of the former River Province offer a treasure trove of First Age wonders, minor dominions and mortal followers for the returned Solar Exalt willing to risk the wrath of the Seventh Legion to claim them.

Secrets of the World contains a variety of Storyteller suggestions and articles to help expand your Scion cycle. There’s information on politics between the Gods and their Scions, more information on feats of strength, more equipment and weapons (including new Relics), a new antagonist group (the Order of the Divine Glory), information on Legendary companions for Scions, step-by-step advice on how to create your own pantheons, titanspawn and Relics, and 26 new story ideas for your cycle.

Secrets of the World is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

The ancient dead keep their own counsel, and they have learned from bitter experience to hold onto any advantage to avoid Oblivion. The Charms within represent such advantage in the Underworld, a means of bringing powers unknown to most of its denizens to bear when necessary. Once practiced only by the dark realm’s elite, these [...]

The Celestial Bureaucracy is the third offering for the Scion companion and a new pantheon – of sorts – delving into Chinese mythology which, to quote the great sage Egg Shen:

“Of course the Chinese mix everything up, look at what we have to work with. There’s Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoist alchemy and sorcery. We take what we want and leave the rest… Just like your salad bar.”

This makes the Celestial Bureaucracy a great hook for Scion, it fits the mould of the game perfectly, kung fu, magic and a huge ‘pantheon’ of sorts with plenty of room for all manner of characters. Indeed, in my opinion, this would have been a far better fit in the original book than the Japanese pantheon would have been.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The Celestial Bureaucracy is a new pantheon for your Scion cycle. This section contains everything you’ll need, including the gods of the Bureaucracy, a complete 1 to 10 dot write up of their pantheon Purview, new Birthrights, new allies, new antagonists, details on their Overworld and Underworld, a new Titan that plagues the Bureaucracy and two sample Scions (one hero and one demigod) so you can jump right into the game.

The Scion Companion Part Three is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

The savage Titans have escaped their eternal prison to wage war with the Gods once more. Their battles in the Overworld have spilled over to ours. Armed with abilities and weapons granted by their divine parents, the Scions stand as humanity’s only defense.

These materials normally retail for $104.97, but in PDF form for the next seven days, you can acquire all three supplements for $46.99 (USD).

The Destiny, Myth & Fate Bundle is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

This is the second part of the Scion Companion to be released as a PDF, the first having been the Tuatha de Daanan segment and with a couple more to come. It furthers White Wolf’s relatively progressive e-book policy while simultaneously acting almost as a preview for the eventual, finished product and also, probably, cunningly getting people to buy much of the same material twice – can’t really fault them for doing that! This section is all about the powers, the elevated statistics and their consequences, the fields of expertise and the powers within those, additional companions, followers, artifacts, magic and so on.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Manifestations of Ichor is a collection of new rules for Scion players. Included are rules on how to make a demigod or God at character creation, 27 new Knacks (three for each Epic Attribute), 15 new Birthrights (three Creatures, three Followers, three Guides and six Relics), a complete pantheon Purview (Scire) and Virtues for the Atlantean pantheon first detailed in Scion: Demigod, 32 new All-Purpose Purview Boons (two for each Purview) and 10 new Magic spells.

Scion is about the only recent output from White Wolf that I’ve really cared for other than Exalted. While the game overall seems to have been completed with Hero, Demigod and God it’s nice to see that it’s getting some ongoing support and even more nice to see that White Wolf seems to be one of the first companies to really start taking PDF publishing seriously. There’s still some imperfections, I believe the idea is to sell sections of the Scion companion bit by bit as complete PDF releases, but to omit some final sections which will only be present in the print version, but it’s a big step in the right direction and one that I hope will be followed up on by other companies. Incidentally, I was about to write a Celtic pantheon fan-offering up for Scion when this came along, so they just managed it in the nick of time!

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The characters in Scion are the long-lost, illegitimate, half-human children of the gods of old, the pantheons, the Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Japanese, Aztec and Voodoo pantheons respectively (though I’m not sure Voodoo deserves to be in such company really). There’s the possibility to play scions of other gods and pantheons as well, but these aren’t detailed in this book.

The Scions are contacted, equipped and gifted by their errant parents and put to work to defend humanity from the machinations and monsters impinging on this world at the behest of the Titans. To help them with this they get magical powers, magical items or companions and other gifts from their parents. Superpowered individuals rampaging about the modern world as demigods, fighting monsters and ancient gods (of the wrong sort).

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough