The Flash Fire Mini-Reviews are back with a set of reviews from Todd Cash. Todd is going to wrap up his the Ready-Made Characters series from White Wolf.

This is the third time I’ve approached character packages like these, so I won’t retread basic thoughts on these character packages (not much at least). If you’d like these details you can find them here and here. Each of these collections, which are fitted for specific settings (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc), run about five dollars (slight differences between titles in price seems mysterious).

Let the buyer beware

Every freehold knows of at least one. Some seem to have grown up almost overnight, like a ring of small white mushrooms. Others seem to have run for millennia, outliving the rise and fall of the freeholds that surround them. They’ll never go away entirely, despite the dangers of their wares. Someone always needs something you can only get at a Goblin Market.

A chronicle book for Changeling: The Lost

Goblin Markets is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Angelo looks around the joint, seeing only marks. Back-room poker is always a mug’s game. Every card dealt brings the unlucky ones closer to losing everything—the shirt on their backs, next month’s rent and more. Some schmucks end up with a gun in their hand, doing some of Lucky Joe’s less pleasant work to pay off their debt.

The hand’s over. One man smiles, greed painted across his face. With a nod from Joe, Angelo takes a seat at the table, in on the game. Time to take it all back.

A free Storytelling Adventure System scene and character for use with Geist: The Sin-Eaters.

The House Always Wins is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

White Wolf appears to be currently composed of scientists rather than writers. There is simply too much experimentation going on with these guys. They have released pre-generated characters for players who need that sort of thing. With Block by Bloody Block, they release pre-generated parts of a city. This isn’t a [insert city here] by Night book. No, these are the sections of any city, ready to be dropped into whatever city fancies your gaming group. The question becomes if the scientists are congratulating themselves over champagne or staring dumbfounded with charcoal-blackened faces and lab-coats.

The layout of this supplement remains true to the Hunter: the Vigil line (this game is intended for players of that game or the basic World of Darkness corebook).

City in the Sand is a new Mind’s Eye Theatre product from White Wolf using the Storytelling Adventure System. This is the first MET product using the SAS format and I was immediately curious about how the format would work in a live-action environment. Let’s just say I was impressed with the overall quality of City in the Sand and at the amount of cool stuff that was included in this product.

I contacted the folks at White Wolf and had the chance to talk to the authors (Eddy Webb, Kelley Barnes and Jess Hartley) about the design of the product and a bit about Mind’s Eye Theatre in general.

So, White Wolf has been releasing a series of “Ready-Made Player Characters” for each game line in the World of Darkness. Todd Cash already reviewed the Vampire: the Requiem set called Slaughterhouse Five here at Flames Rising and had some interesting things to say about why he likes the concept.

I’m going to do a little more of that, especially now that I’ve had the chance to check out a few more of them. It seems that some folks are wondering why anyone would buy such a thing. I’ve seen a couple of posts on the White Wolf Forums to this effect and had at least one IM conversation about it. To me the idea seems like an excellent one. Not all gaming groups have lots of free time to devote just to character creation. Some groups only get together once in a while and would much rather dive into playing the game, rather than working up a backstory and stating out individual characters. These products are exactly what they say, “Ready-Made” and are good to go out of the box (so to speak).

Who do you trust?

A millennia-long search for an ancient Atlantean artifact, the Abedju Cipher, is about to come to an end. Pentacle mages to the Seers of the Throne have sought out the Cipher over the centuries, using both overt and covert means to track down it or its previous owners. Tensions have risen over it more often than not, and many oaths of enmity have been sworn on all sides. Amidst the quest to possess the Abedju Cipher, a number of factions close in to capture the Cipher for their own hidden agendas.

A story in the Storytelling Adventure System for Mage: The Awakening.

The Abedju Cipher is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Blood Drive ($6.99 PDF) is the newest installment from White Wolf’s Storytelling Adventure System. This Hunter: the Vigil adventure offers an action-oriented romp for slightly seasoned characters (XP 25-29). This adventure plays on a personal favorite of mine. It’s the classic tale of the supposedly “easy job” that becomes something else altogether. At eleven scenes and forty-six pages (none of which are ads), this is a healthy night’s adventure or (more likely) multiple sessions of fun.

The direction of this adventure, like other White Wolf products I’ve recently reviewed, continues to impress me. The layout of the adventure offers both the detailed story, which the Storyteller will have to go over and a collection of Scene Cards to act as Storyteller cheat sheets.

White Wolf experiments with “ready-made player-characters” for those gaming groups on the go. Two such PDFs already exist, but I’ll only be talking about the Slaughterhouse Five. The PDF is 26 pages (no ads) devoted to the description of five player-characters and a bit of the world they live in. It’s an interesting idea, so let’s see how I felt it played out.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have wanted to be fed a handful of pre-made characters to push onto my gaming group. It’s too much fun to make your own character. Right? Once upon a time, I would answered “yes” to that question without hesitation. I’ll now mend my answer to “yes, usually.” Why do I now permit myself to sacrifice creativity for availability? First, I no longer believe that question is even valid. The biggest reason why is pointed out by the blurb for the game.

Everything is blood.

The heartland gushes. Highways like arteries. The map darkens with spreading red. At night, it’s all a great big bloody nowhere, a yawning mouth, a hungry shadow. And you have to cross it. It feels like a bad dream. It is a bad dream. This can’t be real. This can’t be what they want you to do. Of course, you know as soon as you wake up it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t stop the fact that tomorrow night, this dream you’re having right now becomes really real, and let’s face it, you’re probably going to die out there.

Blood Drive is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Eddy Webb, Alternative Publishing Developer at White Wolf Publishing, brings us a new design essay today. Eddy tells us how New Wave Requiem was developed, what some of the challenges were and how the project came together.

Finding Horror in the Eighties

New Wave Requiem started as a joke. A bunch of us were clowning around in the Vampire office (where both the developer and art director had their desks) and joked about all the vampire movies in the eighties. The idea stuck in my head long after the conversation ended, and it led to me spending hours doing research, watching movies and constantly rewriting an outline until I really felt that we could do a Vampire product on America in the 1980s and still have it be a horror game.

Once upon a time, my friend David ran a Delta Green game. David was a huge fan of the in-game prop, especially when it came to this particular campaign. If our clues were photographs, we generally had photographs in our paws. If the clue was a recording of some nature, then we also received that. I mention this because White Wolf’s new Collection of Horrors line appears to follow in his beliefs that props are good things. CoH is associated with the Hunter the Vigil line as each entry describes a scene (using the SAS platform) that can either be fitted into an already existing campaign, spark a new campaign, or simply fill up a night’s worth of gaming.

As of this writing there are thirteen PDFs associated with this project (a couple more if you count the introduction module and Horror Recognition Guide).

This week we’re releasing the following kits in the Collection of Horrors: Mother of All Wrong Turns, Caveat Emptor, Body of Evidence, Good for the Soul and Serpent’s Tooth. Mother of All Wrong Turns is already up!

Just learning about the Collection? The Collection of Horrors is an anthology of Storyteller tools inspired by the Horror Recognition Guide that you can either use in conjunction with the Guide or as part of your existing Hunter: The Vigil chronicle.

Check out all of the Hunter: the Vigil products at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

White Wolf takes us back to the Eighties in New Wave Requiem (WW25320). The decision to turn back the clock nearly twenty five years seems to be a brilliant one (Yes, I did say TWENTY FIVE years). Sob. Vampire: the Masquerade hit bookshelves in 1991, so readers never really got a feel for the Reagan Era of gaming. This appears to be their attempt at remedying that issue. This slim supplement weighs in at eighty-one pages; however, it wastes no space with ads (an oddity considering the waste the 1980s created). There are a few pages devoted solely to pieces of art, but these terrific characterizations demand forgiveness as they summon images of The Warriors and an evil Susanna Hoffs.

Review by Todd Cash

Looking for ideas for your Hunter game? The Collection of Horrors is an anthology of Storyteller tools inspired by the Horror Recognition Guide that you can either use in conjunction with the Guide or as part of your existing Hunter: The Vigil chronicle.

Each story kit in the Collection of Horrors (which you can buy individually, as a bundle or as a subscription) contains variety of appropriate tools; usually an SAS scene, a character with a character sheet, and props ranging from maps and reports to print out and hand to your players, to short imbedded audio files that you can play at your gaming table. These kits represent a collection of evocative story tools that you can write a story around, drop into an existing SAS or even string together. They aren’t stories in their own right, but rather pieces that you can snap together into whatever shape you want. Using the Guide can add even more props and ideas to this anthology, but it’s not required to use the various story kits in the Collection of Horrors.

“I see you. You go about your life like nothing ever happened. You think you’re safe now that it’s done, like a problem that you’ve solved once and for all. You’re wrong. I remember what you did. You might have killed me, but I’m not gone. I stayed behind… and I won’t go until you’ve paid.”

This week White Wolf is offering a special bundle at RPGNow that is focused on ghosts and mortal interactions in the World of Darkness. The bundle includes Ghost Stories and Chicago Workings, Regularly 32.98, now $17.99 (savings of 55%).

The Ghost Tales bundle is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Contagion. Plague. Survival.

Out in the Scavenger Lands life is difficult, and compassion can seem like a dangerously unaffordable luxury. But despite the propaganda you might hear in the Realm about the savagery of those beyond the Threshold, most of the folk who call the Confederation of Rivers their home consider themselves good people. But what happens when the imperative to survive challenges one’s moral commitment to one’s fellows? Sacrifices have to be made, but when do the needs of the many justify the losses of a few?

A story in the Storytelling Adventure System for Exalted.

Disease of an Evil Conscience is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Under the Skin is the first adventure using the Storyteller Adventure System that I’ve read, so I found myself looking forward to reading it. Adventures are a tricky bag, especially to a setting as thick as White Wolf’s World of Darkness. I say they are tricky mainly because there always exists the tendency for them to railroad players in an attempt to make sense of the scripted adventure. Some games find a way around this by theorizing alternate endings or sometimes not even offering a true ending (though few do the latter). This adventure makes little effort in offering a free-form style, which we’ll discuss later in the review.

Review by Todd Cash

Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners

Sins of the Ages

So many people wish for fame and renown during their lives — or even for just a little bit of notoriety. But among our Kindred, that’s very nearly a fate worse than death. Don’t take my word for it, though. Go and ask some questions. Find out about who they talk to in the Necropoli of the Nosferatu, and in the perfumed salons of Elysium. Listen to what they say about them, and listen even more carefully to what they don’t say. Then maybe you’ll understand that the worst thing you can do is to stand out in a society of blood-starved murderers, my boy.

Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

AND THERE CAME A DAY WHEN THE GAME MASTER WAS RAISED ON HIGH…

… And we who roll the dice, move the miniatures, and live the stories did celebrate our provider of fun. We sought out great treasures to grant unto him, and thus endow him with even more wonders to further entertain and enchant us.

It’s the biggest sale of the year for us, and a great time for you to check out whatever might be in your GM’s Wish List and get it for her. Dozens of publishers! Hundreds of products! All at 25% off or MORE!

Visit the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop to check out all of the GM’s Day Sale items.