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Warhammer 40,000: Wrath and Glory: Aeldari: Inheritance of Embers
Publisher: Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
by John [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/30/2024 12:03:17

I should like very much to recommend the digital Inheritance of Embers unreservedly, but as of the end of January, 2024, I really cannot. When this PDF is eventually fixed, and the NUMEROUS glaring errors in it are finally corrected, it will be a marvelous resource for Eldar/Aeldari fans. Right now, it's nigh-on unusable in many of its parts.

(And yes, having written for the hobby games industry myself, I know that errata are inevitable. I accept that, as anyone reasonable should. But I'm talking about a staggering number of easily-caught errors that somehow made it to virtual print.)

Copy-and-paste errors abound (notice that the Howling Banshees don't even have Weapon Skill among their required skills even though they're a melee archetype specifically...and then notice that that's because their skill stat line was simply lifted whole cloth from the stealth-and-sniping Ranger archetype).

Similarly, the Wargear chapter is a dreadful mess, and its tables seem largely inconsistent with the Wargear tables in the core rulebook; even weapons like the Warlock's and Farseer's Witchblade inexplicably show different stats from their listings in the core book. If Cubicle 7 has had a genuine change of heart about how efficacious a given Aeldari weapon should be, fine. But indicate that explicitly; otherwise, the discrepancy just looks like shoddy editing, which is what I very much fear it to be.

The problem with such manifold mistakes is that, as with cockroaches spotted in a restaurant kitchen, one immediately begins to worry about all the bugs one can't see. I am hesitant to use much of this book in a campaign at present for the simple reason that I suspect much of its rules crunch as expressed in numbers and keywords is flatly incorrect.

The shame of it all is that, if these mistakes weren't so abundant, this would be a wonderful resource for players and GMs who want to run Eldar characters and campaigns. Inheritance of Embers has just about everything you're looking for if you're an Aeldari fanatic like me—Craftworld, Corsair, Drukhari, and Harlequin archetypes; new weapons and equipment; new psyker powers; new talents; information on the Ynarri; tips for playing these enigmatic aliens; gorgeous (if largely recycled) art; a compelling setting in the Ul-Khari craftworld, which is rich with conflict and juicy plot hooks; a bestiary.... There's a lot here to like, it's true.

But is the book usable at present? Well, sort of. Until the dozens of errata we early adopters have submitted are incorporated into the PDF (along with, ideally, another serious editing pass from C7 staffers themselves), be prepared to make nigh-constant judgment calls about which data in the book to keep and which to dump or revise. And after a while, one wonders why one has paid for a book that one can only use after a generous allotment of homebrew-style tinkering. Fan-written versions of most of the archetypes exist on the internet; at this point, why not just use those instead? Even if that content needs tweaking too, it's free.

If Cubicle 7 wants to charge money for a book that roleplayers can safely regard as both useful and definitive, they simply have to do better than this. I didn't want to be disappointed, and I do still love much of what's in the book, but I'd advise you to wait before buying. As of this writing, the PDF has not been updated since it was released on DriveThruRPG on 11/1/2024 (or 1/11/2024 for us Yanks). I would definitely hold off before handing over your hard-earned money.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Warhammer 40,000: Wrath and Glory: Aeldari: Inheritance of Embers
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The Zorcerer of Zo
Publisher: Atomic Sock Monkey Press
by John D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/16/2022 12:33:25

The Zantabulous Zorcerer of Zo is possibly the most useful, inspirational, and gratifying RPG I own. If this one isn't in your collection, you're missing out not just on a brilliant game design (I'm a big fan of the Prose Descriptive Qualities system), but on a book that provides that rarest of feelings: that the author is a charismatic friend sitting next to you and cheering you on as youy read.

Partly it comes from the fact that ZoZ was one of the first products I can think of (and given that we're talking RPGs here, I am sure it will be no more than a nanosecond before some irony-deprived pedant comes along to correct me) to include actual play documents and commentary as an integral part of the game. Indeed, as many reviewers have noted, a huge percentage of the page count is essentially liner notes and director's commentary.

You know what I absolutely love? Good liner notes and director's commentary. I was a pretty seasoned nerd by the time ZoZ came out, but if I hadn't been, this game would have been invaluable in showing me what a GM actually does. I realize that nowadays the answers are no more than a YouTube link away, and that streamers are legion, but in the early 2000s, those sources weren't nearly as thick on the ground.

What's more, Chad Underkoffler has a beautiful knack for communicating clearly, warmly, and engagingly. Finding a balance between those three writerly imperatives is brutally difficult, but Underkoffler is an avuncular master at walking you through his toy chest and showing you how all the cool dolls and puppets can come to life.

I pretty much never say things are not to be missed. But this is a game everyone should own and read, a true gem. If you haven't checked it out yet, you are in for an enviable treat.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
The Zorcerer of Zo
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7th Sea: The New World
Publisher: Chaosium
by John D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 05/23/2021 11:15:27

I like this product a lot; hence the five stars.

I'd like to like it more. Please bear with me, as it may take a little bit for me to get to the larger concern that The New World raises (for me at least).

I'm an old-school fan of 7th Sea going back to the game's first edition; I was in my Friendly Local Game Store the day the two core rulebooks came out. I'm also a cultural anthropologist and folklorist by training, and a history and literature teacher of about two decades' vintage, just so you know where I'm coming from.

Overall I've found the second edition to be a very pleasant improvement over some of first edition's...quirks. One of the things I've been happiest about in second edition is the much more robust and culturally sensitive attention given to the parts of the game world that aren't Europe. For instance, The Crescent Empire is in many ways a masterpiece of evocative, gameable setting work; in graduate school Turkish folk epic (and folk narrative in Islam more generally) was my area of specialization, and the rules for poetry duels and the like delighted me. The fact that the opening fiction was a clear nod to Farid ud-Din Attar's Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds delighted me. And on and on.

And yet...

There was something not quite right about Crescent Empire. Something that niggled at me, despite my abundant affection for the numerous things it did excellently. It took me a while to figure it out, and it was The New World that finally made me see it.

The Crescent Empire as presented in 7th Sea is so much like the actual Ottoman Empire...except in all the ways that it isn't. No, I'm not dumb; I get that the whole 7th Sea universe is a varyingly loose gloss on seventeenth (more or less) century reality, but not that reality itself. Nonetheless, I can't help feeling like the divergences are starting to go too far for me personally.

(I will get to The New World, I promise.)

In the second edition Crescent Empire, a new Empress has just instituted a series of reforms that are so sweeping, so liberalizing, and so wildly historically improbable, that I couldn't help but shake my head reading about them. The abolition of the class system? In seventeenth-century Ottoman Turkey? My brain couldn't cope. It was a change too far, one so radical that the setting no longer made sense, no longer felt enough like real history that I could accept it even while squinting hard.

The fact that Théah isn't our actual historical world is a great gift: the game's designers can create more space for female, queer, and racially diverse characters. That's wonderful, and I support it fully! But while Théah isn't our world exactly, it needs to be enough like our world that there's a value in adventuring there, and not somewhere far more divorced from Earth's history, like the Forgotten Realms or Middle-earth or Barsoom.

(I had an intimation of the problems that were on the way when I first read the second edition core rulebook. Apparently nations in Théah don't care about the race of their citizens; if you're an Avalon, you're an Avalon whether your ancestry stretches back centuries in the Glamour Isles or whether your parents immigrated from Ifri a decade ago. That's a lovely idea, and I understand the good intentions that underpin it: make it easier for gamers of color, or anyone else, to play characters of color from any of the mock-European nations. I am all for this!

But...

It's not how seventeenth century Europe regarded questions of race and ancestry. At. All. And while I would much rather live in a world with Théah's racial politics than the ones real history has handed us, the historian in me goes a little crazy when I have to imagine a seventeenth-century Europe that is, frankly, more racially enlightened than twenty-first century America. [Admittedly, that doesn't seem hard, these days. sigh])

I could deal with the ahistoricity around race and nationality. I can sort of deal with the idea of a classless Ottoman Empire—I almost can't write the words—if only because there's so much nifty stuff in the other parts of the Crescent Empire book. But I think New World may have broken me.

You see, the Nahual Alliance, the Aztec analogues in New World don't practice ritual human sacrifice. I mean they used to, but they don't anymore. In fact, now they abhor the act.

blinks

I'm sorry? These Aztecs dont' practice sacrifice? What on earth, then, makes them Aztec? So much, so very, very, very much of Aztec society at the time period (give or take a century or two) 7th Sea is set revolved around human sacrifice. The religious imperative to sacrifice captive humans shaped military policy, weapon design, sociocultural organization, art and architecture and literature...I could go on. When you remove that aspect of the Aztecs, or Nahuals, or whoever, you make them something fundamentally other, something fantastic in the pejorative sense of the world. Not Aztec anymore. Something so disconnected from real world history that you may as well be roleplaying in Gary Gygax's Oerth, not John Wick and company's Théah. (No disrespect to Oerth meant.)

Again, I get it. On one level, I think the desire to present Latinx gamers with Aztecs who aren't as morally problematic as the real Aztecs were is laudable. But as much as I love Ottoman culture, I don't love a Crescent Empire flensed of the very real problems and contradictions that made it what it was, that made it so compelling, and yes, so ripe for heroic and swashbuckling adventure. Every culture has these kinds of problems, of course, including all the European ones. The 7th Sea corebook is totally willing to give us, for example, a Montaigne/France that groans beneath some stupefyingly awful situations stemming from the callousness of the aristocracy. We are all but told bloody revolution is inevitable, and why shouldn't it be? That's great! That's super-gameable! Now there's a horrible problem for heroes to get caught up in, and to try to solve!

New World could do that with the Nahual Alliance. Keep human sacrifice—believe me, as a Spanish speaker and lover of Mexico, I have no desire for Mexican or any other Latinx gamers to be offended, but the fact that the Aztecs ritually killed in such large numbers is a massive matter of historical record. Keep the sacrifices, but create a niche for the players to be part of a small insurgency working to bring it to an end. Or better still, have one of the secrets of the game world be that human sacrifice, while monstrous, is something the Nahual must do in order to forestall an even worse evil, like the return of the monstrous elder god beings The New World keeps alluding to. Suddenly we've got moral tension! Ambiguity! The need for tough choices!

You know, all the stuff people of conscience (a.k.a. heroes) face in real life. In real history.

I should point out that The New World, which gives us three civilizations, the faux-Aztecs, faux-Maya, and faux-Inka, does nail one of those three beautifully. The Inka analogue, Kuraq, is ruled by an awful person doing awful things with necromancy and the living mummies of ancestors, and there's a perfect opportunity for heroes to join, or foment, a rebellion against her. The writer or writers of this section had the courage to give us a culture that was problematic, that had made bad choices, that needed heroes. And those heroes hardly have to be white saviors from faux-Europe; let them be rogue faux-Inkans fighting to make their civilization better. Wouldn't that be awesome?

I guess what I'm saying, in a too-long and roundabout way, is that I wish the 7th Sea authors would recognize that honoring the dignity and worth of non-European cultures doesn't require us to make them nicer than they were in real history. You can respect and admire much of Ottoman, or Aztec, or Inka culture and still condemn many of their leaders' decisions and their religions' practices. As long as you are making a sincere, anthropologically deep effort to understand why these cultures do things that seem contemptible from outside, it's okay to give them warts. Not only are those warts the stuff of adventure—wrongs that need righting—they're historically honest.

I'm reminded of what Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday says in the first installment of Ken Burns's documentary series The West, the installment focused on Native Americans prior to contact with Europeans. He states that the first thing we need to do is dismiss artificial and romanticized visions of Native peoples as living in perfect harmony with one another, or with the land. They fought each other, they were cruel and petty, and they radically transformed the American Midwest through pretty intensive terraforming (see Charles Mann's 1491 for more detail). They were certainly noble and worthy of admiration, these cultures—but not in every respect, and not all the time. To make them less complicated, less problematic, than they were is ironically to erase a great deal of their authentic dignity.

This is the problem 7th Sea has been having, with the very best of intentions, and that problem comes to a head in The New World. Gone are human sacrifice and the environmental depredations of the Mayan elites. Super-weirdly, gone too is the scope and brutality of armed conflict between Europeans and Natives; in 7th Sea's New World, this conflict is so curiously muted as to astonish anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of the history of contact between, say, Spain and the Aztec and Inka.

You may not care about these things, or you may disagree with me; I rated New World a five out of five stars precisely because there is so much good stuff here (and because I honor the authors' good intentions), so clearly I still think The New World has a lot of terrific material on offer.

But what I want for the entire world of 7th Sea is not non-Europeans who are deracinated and sanitized in order to make them seem heroic in a generic sense. What I want for those peoples—the analogues of Native Americans, Eurasian Muslims, Africans, East Asians—is complexity, and honest reference to their cultures' flaws as well as their virtues. (Yes, cultural relativism makes discussion of subjective concepts like "flaws" and "virtues" tricky; fine, note the contradictions and foreground them.)

I want Aztecs (and Maya, for that matter, since human capture and sacrifice were also central to the cultures of the Mayan city-states) who are politically complex, religiously sophisticated, architecturally and agriculturally brilliant—hell yes, I do! But I also want Aztecs who sacrifice captives from the states they've conquered, and whose society is in terrible danger of overthrow because of its addiction to a practice nearly all of us would condemn. That's historically honest, as I've noted, and it also makes a better and livelier and more conflict-rich world for gaming.

Your mileage may vary, and again, I want to salute the designers' efforts, which are themselves noble and admirable. I haven't even mentioned the gorgeous art or the story seeds sprinkled liberally throughout or the very thoughtful section on how to bring a non-European setting to thoughtful, dynamic, and sensitive life. Those are all outstanding.

But I think it's time to raise the bar a bit, and to have the courage to stare history—all our histories, no matter what our ancestry is—more squarely in the face.

As I write these words, the Texas State Legislature is making it harder and harder for teachers in that part of the country to acknowledge Texas's vicious but real history of slavery and anti-Mexican violence. I am firmly of the mindset that white people need to confront the origins of their privilege in earlier history, but by the exact same token, game designers need to remember that just because a culture, white or nonwhite, embraces an immoral practice (enslavement; sacrifice; oppressive social stratification) doesn't mean it lack dignity or positive qualities as well.

Only when we present the entire picture of a culture, with all its contradictions and all its controversies, can we truly begin to understand it.

Too much obsession over a game manual that never pretended to be real history? Maybe. But—to its great credit—7th Sea has decided to engage with this particular debate about race, culture, history, and power. As long as it choose to do so, we have to hold it to the same high standard of critical thinking to which we'd hold any cultural product.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
7th Sea: The New World
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Hoodoo Blues the Role Playing Game
Publisher: Vajra Enterprises
by John D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/23/2010 11:33:31

Just when I think there is nothing new under the Louisiana sun, premise-wise, in roleplaying games, some inventive souls come along to prove me quite happily wrong. "Hoodoo Blues" is an obvious labor of love; I know because I'm a folklorist and history teacher with over twenty years' interest in American folk religion and magic, and I love the game's subject matter too. Fortunately, you don't need to be a scholar to appreciate the depth and vitality of what Vajra Enterprises has accomplished with their newest game -- all you need is an interest in rich, complicated characters and their struggles across years of conflict and upheaval.

In "Hoodoo Blues" players take the roles of the ageless, Southern individuals granted (or cursed with) supernatural longevity. Character class selection further defines the reasons behind characters' ability to transcend the aging process, and also suggests internal conflicts and goals. As another reviewer has noted, players will need to create their characters carefully so as not to produce irresolvable interpersonal differences during play; on the other hand, one of the strengths of Southern history as a gaming backdrop is that characters of disparate races, social classes, and religions will come into conflict with each other, and it seems that the game designers welcome this tension to a large extent.

The game centers on the folkways and magico-religious traditions of three groups in the South: Blacks, Native Americans, and Whites, with the emphasis definitely favoring the first. Characters might be root doctors in the syncretic hoodoo tradition, laying hands and conducting a shadow war against other hoodoos; priests and priestesses of the American voodoo tradition most often associated with New Orleans; or traditional medicine workers from one of a number of Southern indigenous cultures.

All of these options are sensitively and accurately (within the confines of a gameable milieu, anyway) presented, and each is rich and entertaining in its scope and abilities. However, "Hoodoo Blues" also offers another sort of player character role: that of an individual desperately trying to outmaneuver the Devil, who gave her supernatural power and longevity in the first place. This broader category includes Robert Johnson-esque "Crossroaders" who sell their souls to Old Scratch in exchange for various sorts of power; Loups Garoux, the cursed werewolves of Cajun and Creole legend; and Hags, women (and a few men) who ride mortals during the night in order to drain their vitality. Again, all of these options feel right (to this folklorist, at least), and show the deep and attentive research the authors have clearly done.

Each character type has its own strengths and weaknesses, but in addition all character classes can take skill levels in Conjure, the game's catch-all term for Southern magical practices. Conjure includes the making of hoodoo hands, the petitioning of voodoo loa, and even the ability to summon the Devil at a lonely crossroads at midnight. The rules for Conjure are detailed and well-thought-out, and contribute greatly to the richness of the setting.

Speaking of which, it's hard to imagine a denser and more wonderful context for great storytelling than the past two hundred years or so of Southern history (and I'm saying that as a Yankee); impressively, "Hoodoo Blues" offers a truly massive amount of gamer-friendly historical and cultural detail covering everything from the daily wages of Confederate soldiers to the code phrases of the Underground Railroad to the etiquette rules that comprise Southern manners.

All of this information is potentially highly relevant, because "Hoodoo Blues" supports what it calls flashback play, a style of game in which gamers explore earlier periods in the ageless's long lives -- your 150-year-old Hoodoo Doctor might be powerful, prosperous, and respected today, but flashback play allows you to tell stories about his suffering under the lash of slavery during the Antebellum Period, and about his harrowing escape to freedom. Flashback play is practically a must in such a historically rich game setting, and while the game's mechanical guidelines for this style of roleplaying aren't tremendously extensive, there is certainly more than enough cultural and historical information to get GMs and players started.

The rules themselves derive from Vajra's house system, the Organic Rules Components, or ORC (heh). I find them a bit fiddly in places, but no more so than most tabletop rulesets I've encountered over the years. There's a rules-light version in the back of the PDF for anyone who wants less crunch, but really, the amount in the default mechanics isn't onerous. Creating characters will take a long time -- my first took me about two hours -- what with all the different aspects of characters' abilities and lengthy personal histories, but it's an investment of time that will certainly bear (strange) fruit during play.

To sum up, it's been a long, long time since I've been this excited about a new RPG, and I recommend "Hoodoo Blues" with enthusiasm (even if you're not as much of a folklore wonk as the authors or this reviewer, you really can't go wrong paying $4.95 for 312 pages of really nifty material). And heck, any game that asks me to define my character's personality by specifying his favorite musical styles is a game I wanna play.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Hoodoo Blues the Role Playing Game
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Ancient Echoes: A Sourcebook For Cetacean Characters
Publisher: Biohazard Games
by John D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/18/2008 13:24:33

I am beyond delighted that RedBrick is re-releasing the Blue Planet v2 sourcebooks as PDFs (and high-quality ones, at that). I am especially pleased that their first release is the excellent and sadly long-out-of-print Ancient Echoes, a guide to the biology, history, and culture of genlifted cetaceans (in this case, bottlenose dolphins, orcas, common dolphins, belugas, and pilot whales, all available as player characters).

If you don't know Blue Planet, and you are a fan of any of the following [marine biology, well-researched but sense of wonder-inducing hard science fiction/biopunk, unique and evocative roleplaying settings], you owe it to yourself to check out BP. And since, for me at least, sentient cetaceans are the most fascinating aspect of the Blue Planet setting, this book is a real treat to finally have in electronic form. (I'm one of the lucky ones with a first-run print copy, but good luck finding one now.)

The PDF is clean and well-organized; the text is digital and crisp rather than just scanned from paper, and the bookmarks are thorough and sensible. But above and beyond that, this is one of the best sourcebooks for what I think is pretty inarguably the best hard SF roleplaying game ever made. RedBrick plans to support the Blue Planet line further as soon as the original v2 books are reprinted/epublished, and I encourage you to support them in their revitalization of an absolutely compelling, wonderfully gameable setting.

In short, Ancient Echoes and Blue Planet in general receive my highest possible recommendation.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Ancient Echoes: A Sourcebook For Cetacean Characters
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