100 Days of Halloween: Tarot Magic

Digging deep tonight with one going all the way back to the d20 days. Everything about it just fills me with early 2000s nostalgia. Is it the lens flare on the logo? Is it the repeated use of the Morpheus font (which I STILL like)? I don't know. But whatever it is this one has been sitting on my hard drive for nearly 15 years or more (20 if you count the softcover I used to have) waiting for me to review it.

Tarot Magic

PDF. 90 pages, color cover, black & white interior art.

This book had been published originally back in 2002-2003 by Mystic Eye Games for the d20 OGL and STL. Yes we are going all the way back to the d20 System Trademark License here.

Now it has been updated in a 2016 re-upload by Samurai Sheepdog.  I still have my original PDF on a backup drive so I can compare them. The cover is the same, but a bit brighter and the Samurai Sheepdog logo and website is there.  Also, all mention of Mystic Eye Games is gone. The back cover is missing as well. But the PDF is also clearer to read and generally of better quality.

I will note that this book is filed under the D&D 3.5 category, but it is really D&D 3.0.  I don't think it makes much practical difference to be honest.

The book is divided into five major sections.

Chapter 1: Tarot Reading in the Game

This cover the basics of card layout and meaning and how they can be used in a game situation. In most cases, the book advises the GM to control what the deck will be saying to fit the narrative/structure of the game.  The most value here are the card meanings, though that information is also widely available elsewhere.

Chapter 2: Tarot Mage Class and Prestige Class

Now, this is fun.  Presents the Tarot Mage class that can be used as a regular class or as a prestige class.  Honestly, I like the option.  I think it works well as a Prestige Class with someone starting as a wizard, sorcerer, witch, or even a thief with some arcane ability.  Example NPCs of both a Tarot Mage and a Wizard/Tarot Mage are given.

Chapter 3: Tarot Mage Spells

This is a meaty chapter and kudos for coming up with all these spells. There are 38 pages worth of spells. Not a lot of art means a lot of text. 

The spells are all "Arcane" so they are also listed by their school.

Chapter 4: Magic Items

These come in three major types; cards, materials to make cards,  and items related to what are on the tarot cards. 

Chapter 5: Foul Locales

Ok. This one is odd. Chapters 1 to 4 all proper headers with large fonts.  This one starts at the bottom of a column when the magic items end.  The only thing connecting it to the book is the fact that members of the family living in this locale are all Tarot Mages.

In any case it is an interesting book and one I tried many times to use back in the 3.x days.  It is high on concept but the usability of the core class was limited compared to the Wizard/Sorcerer.  The prestige class was much more useful. 

Still it was rather fun.

Review: Vigilante City #3 Superhero Team-Up!

We continue our tour of Vigilante city with the next book in the series and the first expansion. If this one makes you think of the Teen Titans, then I think that might be the point.

Vigilante City #3 Superhero Team-Up!

PDF and softcover book. 176 pages. Color cover, black & white interior art.  For the purposes of this review, I am considering the PDF from DriveThruRPG and the soft-cover books I picked up from Bloat Games' own store.

Classes

This book presents some new classes for us to try out.  They are the Alchemist, Getaway Driver, Mutant Hunter, Occultist, Revenant Hero, Sewer Guardian, Tunnel Shadow, and the Weapon Master.

So bits of TMNT poking through again, but that is perfectly fine really.  The classes are good and few I really like. The Occultist was the obvious choice and yes I am a fan, but also the Alchemist and the Revenant Hero for running a game like The Crow. 

We get some new skills too. The nice thing about VC is the skill system is very flexible. You could even run it without skills if you like.  I try not to get too bogged down in the skills myself, but the system here makes it rather easy to use. 

Teams

This section is where I am getting the Teen Titan vibe, though it can cover all sorts of teams.  The first is team combo actions which give you some ideas on how teams can work together.  There is some detail on your base of operations as well. Covers everything from living in the sewers to a giant tower shaped like a T if that is your fancy.

Gear

Alchemists and Occultists can make potions so there is new gear associated with that. There are new items of equipment and vehicles. If you ever needed to know how much it would cost to build your own superhero lair then this book has you covered.

Dr. Azmournus and More

We get into a section of rogues next. Up first is the evil Dr. Azmournus and his crew. This guy does tests on mutants and Anthropomorphs to create even more mutated creatures. He is not a pleasant guy. We also get his mutated crew.

There is a vigilante group that doesn't quite operate within the law, the "Wretch Slayers," and a group of sewer-dwelling crime fighters that face off against Dr. Azmournus and his crew ("Insecto's Sewer Guard").

There are more, but you get the idea. Use them all or none, but they add a bit more color to the streets, and under the streets, of Victory City.

Adventures

What might be the best part of a book full of great parts are the adventures. Included here are "Backup"  by David Okum and homage to the "Buddy Cop" movies of the 70s and 80s.  "The SynGen Situation" by Melanie R. Meadors, an open-end, even "sandbox" style adventure to get players and characters acquainted with Victory City.  You get to meet other heroes and even have a run-in with a noisy reporter! There is even a tavern where you can meet up.  Michele Lee gives us "The Demonic Cabal" here you get to meet a mentor in the form of Roadkill an ex-cop and former vigilante.  Of course, Roadkill soon lives up to his name and is dead. It is up to the player characters to find out how and why. Friend of the Other Side James M. Spahn is up with "Quiver of Serpents" which is more of an introduction to the criminal organization, the titular Quiver of Serpents as the PC's version of the Legion of Doom.  

All in all the book works really well and is a worthy addition to the Vigilante City line.

Taryn Nix aka "Teen Witch"

Taryn is, as long-time readers might know, the daughter of my iconic witch Larina. She began not as a D&D character but as a Mutants & Masterminds one (back in the M&M 2.0 days) and a BESM 3.0 character.  Naturally, I would use her as my go-to character for trying out magic systems in superhero games.

She and Larina have, well, issues. No need to get into them here, but suffice to say that if Larina is a "witch" archetype then Taryn is my "warlock" archetype. Taryn is also my "embrace the stereotype" character. So she will wear a large witch hat and all the rest. I swear it is like she tries to piss her mother off.  She is a hero, or maybe a reluctant hero, because she likes to hang out west of town where she can watch the VC Yakuza's hanger's-on race their highly modified and not exactly street legal motorcycles. If she were in the Teen Titans she would 100% be into Robin. 

In this game, I would say she gets into some trouble because some potions she has made are being sold as drugs and now she has all the wrong people interested in her. 

100 Days of Halloween: Beyond the Mundane

This one is not a witch book, per see, but rather for all sorts of spell-casters for Pathfinder. I grabbed it for this and also because it uses the same Dean Spencer cover I did for my Winter Witch book. I thought it might be fun to use them together. 

As always, to stay objective I will be following my rules for these reviews.  

Beyond the Mundane

PDF. 30 pages. Title page, 1-page OGL.  Color cover and interior art. 

This book has archetypes for all the spellcasting classes for Pathfinder.

Among the ones I like the most are the Choreographer (Bard), Blood-Spiller (Bloodrager), Primal Growler (Cleric), Lunar Touched (Druid), Agent of the Green (Hunter), and Cupbearer (Witch).

There are a lot here and each one does ad something interesting to their base class. It is really good and if you play Pathfinder and want to try something new then grab this.

There is also a new race, the Shadiir, who are naturally magic, so a good race choice for any and all of these archetypes.

I did not see anything I could use with my witches or my Winter Witch in particular, but it was fun all the same. 

 

Review: Vigilante City #2 Villain's Guide

Book 2 of the SURVIVE THIS!! Vigilante City core rules is the Villain's Guide and it was shipped out with Core Rules #1.  It's Vigilante City week, so let us get to it.

Vigilante City #2 Villain's Guide

PDF and softcover book. 300 pages. Color cover, black & white interior art.  For the purposes of this review, I am considering the PDF from DriveThruRPG and the soft-cover books I picked up either via Kickstarter or from Bloat Games' own store.

This book builds off of the Vigilante City #1 Core Rules. While it says "Villain's Guide" on the cover it is really much more than that. 

Victory City

We start out with the titular Vigilante City, "Victory City." We get the layout of the city and its districts. We get a great map of the city (and it is reprinted on the back).  

Since this is street-level supers we get a lot of gangs. The gangs do feel like what you might get if you took the gangs from the movie The Warriors and let them populate Gotham City from Batman the Animated Series for a while. Yeah, it is every bit as fun as it sounds. I bet the creative team had a blast working on this. 

There is a great section following about building your own city or adding to Victory City.  Personally, I would rather add to the existing VC.  I mean nearly every superhero story is defined by the city they live in. So for a Vigilante City game, I am going to want to play in Vigilante City.

Anthropomorph Island is our next big section and it is an island of anthropomorphic animals. Not all of them are teenage. It's a neat little addition to the superhero mythos. 

There are a couple of sample adventures, which is nice.

Rogues Gallery

At about 75 pages in we finally get the Rogue Gallery. Ok, "finally" is too strong. Everything up to this point has been great. But let's be honest it is the bad guys that are the most fun.

Nearly 90s pages of all sorts of bad guys (and girls and animals) here and they are all fun.

There are a couple of local heroes, some sample characters, and a bunch NPCs. 

Bestiary 

There is a bestiary that covers normal animals to were-beasts and other threats. Bigfoot is even here! Note: The Dark Places & Demogorgons Cryptid Manual would work great with this. 

Community Content

I *think* this material was part of the Kickstarter where backers could submit heroes and villains of their own. This is that section and it is a lot of fun really.  I mean really, we are getting an official version of the Acrobatic Flea? Worth the price of the book alone!

This book could have been also called the GM's Guide, with all the material here.  It is great stuff. Can you play VC without it? Sure. And you can also have Batman without the Joker and Gotham City but it would not be as much fun.

The Refrigerator for Vigilante City

Time to revisit one of my favorite bad guys for a supers game, Dr. Andreas Gelé, AKA "The Refrigerator."

A while back I introduced you all to Dr. Andreas Gelé, aka The Refrigerator. He is a socially stunted misanthrope with mommy issues and the intellect to act out in the worst ways possible.

This guy came, literally, out of a nightmare.  Around 1982 or so (I was 12) I was hit with a double shot of women being frozen alive, the movies were "In Like Flint" and "Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die." It really bugged the hell out of me and gave me nightmares for a long time.  Still kind of bugs me.  Of course, later I learned there is a whole creepy fetish thing related to this.  I think my issue is far more elemental.  I hate being really cold and think being frozen is quite possibly the worst thing ever.

His name comes from the classic Women in Refrigerators website started by Gail Simone.

The Refrigerator in Victory City

What brings the infamous Dr. Gelé to VC? Well, I see him as sort of a Dr. Phibes-like character now, he freezes and defrosts himself periodically to inflict new horrors on the world.  He has moved his operation to VC to once again seek out beautiful women for his collection.  

Once again I went old school for this sheet.

I could see him maybe trying to do research at Victory City University's library (he is old school after all) where he sees my Larina working there in her guise as a librarian. Well...not a guise really she got a degree in this. He decides he needs to add her to his perverse collection completely unaware that she is also the superhero known as the Witch.

His big evil plan might be thwarted by my other big bad.  Who is that? Well, that will be revealed on Friday!

I can see this game taking the place of Icons or Villains & Vigilantes in my life. It is at the intersection of them both for me.

100 Days of Halloween: Witch The Road to Lindisfarne

One of the things I talk about here is something I call Traveller Envy. This is the feeling I got from watching Traveller and their interconnected RPGs and Board Games.  It is something I would love to replicate for my D&D games and for my War of the Witch Queens campaign in particular. 

I can't always find board games that fit the bill for me, but I have tried.  While not a board game this GM-less "story game" does fit the bill of this notion for me.  But how is it?  Let's find out.

Witch: The Road to Lindisfarne

PDF. 32 pages. Multiple files.

So this is a story game, not something I have a ton of experience with.

It says 4 to 6 players, no dice, pencils, or extra paper needed. 

The game takes place in London in 1350 but you head to the Abbey at Lindisfarne; the same that was rather famously attacked by the Viking raids. 

Each player gets one of the characters included in this file. The special character is Elouise our central witch, or at least a confessed witch. There are two outcomes her player can choose, Elouise is Guilty or she is Innocent. Depending on which one is chosen determines the end of the game.

The purpose of the game is to take Elouise from London to Lindisfarne.  There are many stops along the way and the players describe what their characters do along the way. The other players (and characters) do not know the Truth of Elouise so they seek to discover it. It is entirely possible that Eloise is found guilty and burned at the stake or found innocent and set free independently of the truth.

If this sounds like the 2011 movie Season of the Witch, well the designers agree with you.

The game is very interesting and it does give me a lot of ideas of things to do with my own games.

The game does have re-playability, with different characters being played by the same group, but I can also see that it is a little limited in that respect.

Still, a fun game to play on a cold wet afternoon in late October.

 

Review: Vigilante City #1 Core Rules

It is the start of Vigilante City Week here at The Other Side for my unofficial Super Hero month of September.  

Vigilante City has been sitting on top of the computer I use as a home server forever.  I figure now is a great time to let everyone know about this great street-level supers game.

Vigilante City #1 Core Rules

PDF and softcover book. 292 pages. Color cover, black & white interior art.  For the purposes of this review, I am considering the PDF from DriveThruRPG and the soft-cover books I picked up either via Kickstarter or from Bloat Games' own store.

Vigilante City, or more accurately, SURVIVE THIS!! Vigilante City #1 Core Rules, is a street-level supers game for the SURVIVE THIS family of games from Bloat Games. The same folks that gave us the awesome Dark Places & Demogorgons and the amazing We Die Young RPGs.  So right away these rules feel familiar.  But this game is more about teenage angst in the 80s and 90s. There are mean streets out there.

The game really is a great starter for anyone that has played D&D/OSR-like games and wants to get into a supers game.  Like all SURVIVE THIS!! games this one in class and level with levels topping off at 10. 

Right from the start, this game lets us know what it is all about. These are street-level supers. While there might the occasional mutant, anthropomorphic otter, Super Soldier, or power suit we will not be seeing the likes of Superman or Wonder Woman. This is Batman, Captain America, and Tony Stark down all the way to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and some guy with a baseball bat.  If this sounds like your kind of game (and really who wouldn't want to play this?) then buckle in, because this is going to be fun.

The Core Rule book covers the basic hero classes (this is a class/level system derived from the SRD) and basic rules.  I am going to point out here that the rules are very much the same as other Survive This!! games with notable areas to aid heroic play.  While in the past I have pointed out that teens of the 80s in Dark Places & Demogorgons can grow up to become the young adults of the 90s We Die Young, there is no logical progression here from those games. To be fair that is also not the designer's intent. I *can* see a world that involves all these games (that and their newer What Shadows Hide line) but let's first appreciate this game for what it is right now and not what inhuman creation I'll make with it later. 

The Basics

We start off with the basic rules, or maybe I should say "Basic" rules since these rules are designed from the d20 SRD to feel like old-school D&D, D&D Basic in particular. As mentioned before it shares this design with all the other Survive This!! games.  You generate attributes, the usual six plus a seventh "Survival," you generate your saving throws, pick your alignments, calculate your Vigilante Points, work out your Origin/Background (every good hero has a backstory!) and then comes the time to choose your class.

Human Classes

Basic D&D's DNA is peaking through here. You have your normal human classes and then a section on "Mega Humans." But let us talk about humans first.  Essentially these are the roles that an everyday, but not really average, human could pick up and say "I am going to fight crime as a ..." Yes a lot of these require training and/or to be born with the right genetic lottery (smart, rich, or both).  

These classes are: Athlete, Crime Fighter, Dark Avenger, Gadgeteer, Genius, Hardboiled Detective, Knight Nurse, Martial Artist, Mentor, Mercenary, Protégé, Sharp Shooter, Street Preacher, and True Vigilante.  Most, if not all are fairly self-explanatory.  Each gets 10 levels of advancement where they gain certain advantages. Like the comics that inspired them the character classes are fairly 2-Dimensional. THIS IS APPROPRIATE. You fill in the blanks with your backgrounds and skills. You can choose "Street Preacher" but you have to figure out if you are Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel's character in "From Dusk til Dawn) or Jesse Custer from Preacher. 

Mega-Humans

Much like the split between Demi-humans and humans in D&D, and Meta-humans/Mutants and humans in comics, we get our section on Mega-Humans. Mega humans are both a "species" and a "class" they can pick up skill packages to differentiate themselves, but largely this is what they are. Again, this fits the tone of the X-man comics.

Our Mega-Human classes are: Anthropomorphs, Borg, Mutant, Mystic, Powered Armor, Psion, Super Soldier, and Super Speedster.  Lots of choices here.  

These classes and their powers (spells for the mystic, psionics for the psion) cover the first 210 pages of or 2/3rds of this book.  That is expected really.

The classes are followed with Skils & Skill Packs, XP/Leveling, Gear, Vehicles, Game Terms and Critical tables.

There is a solid index and the PDF is bookmarked. 

The game has a feel of Villians & Vigilantes mixed with Mutants & Masterminds with the difficulty of Icons.  Any veteran of either of those games will pick this one up fast. Anyone that has played D&D or other Survive This!! games will pick it up even faster.  That is already given the fact that this is a quick and easy game to learn and play.  There are groups out there that are searching for the perfect Supers game and this could very well be it for them.  I find it very, very appealing.  

Like all games from Bloat Games, there is a lot of support online and in other books for this line.

Larina Nix for Vigilante City

Give me a magic-using class and I am going to try it out with my Drosophila melanogaster of magic, Larina. 

Given this is an old-school game I opted to go old school with dice, a printed character sheet, and a pencil.  I spent longer troubleshooting my scanner than I did on this character build!

I like how she came out, to be honest. And I like how fast it was to create a 10th-level character too. I'll pick her spells later. I figure she would have access to all of them. 

I'll do this for the other books in the series as well, adding what each book adds to the game. This will be quite fun really. 

All I could think of while doing all of this was this song.  So play us home Steve!

100 Days of Halloween: Book of Lost Spells (PF1 & D&D5)

Frog God Games has long been producing great gaming products for a variety of systems. Their dedication to old-school style play comes from their earliest years when they were associated with Necromancer Games. So to see a couple of new spell books (and you know I love spells!)  for D&D 5e AND Pathfinder featuring all sorts of old-school spells?  Yeah. Put me down for one of each, please.

Book of Lost Spells (Pathfinder) and Book of Lost Spells (5e)

PDF. 201 pages (PF) and 137 pages (5e).  Color covers. Black & white interior art.

The content of these two books is largely the same. The 5e smaller page count comes from the rules ability to cast spells at higher levels for increased effects, while Pathfinder (like the games that came before it) needs a different spell at higher levels.  Also, Pathfinder has more spell-using classes, so their spell lists take up more page count.

There are other minor differences depending on what spells each of their respective core rules already has, but the focus of both books is to provide classic "1st Edition" era spells to the new editions.

In both cases, the books have the spell lists by class and level first then followed by the spells and descriptions in alphabetical order.  

The spells are largely SRD derived and are certainly like the feel of 1st edition spells. Frog God is very, very good at doing this. I have not yet found any specifically from 1st ed AD&D that is not in the SRD but is also here.  There are a few that have new names that essentially do the same thing, which is fine by the OGL really.  

If you are a Pathfinder or 5e player and you want/need more spells then these books are a treasure trove, whether you played AD&D 1st or not. If you did then you will find something that feels familiar and new at the same time. 

Unless you play both games (or level spell books) then you don't need both, but I am happy to have them both to be honest.

In both cases, I have found them incredibly useful.