Thrillin' Heroics

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4 out of 5 rating for Thrillin' Heroics

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, on a few counts.

I found the Rules Digest at the start of the book somewhat reminiscent of the new D&D Basic Rules. Actually, a better comparison is with the rulebook in the D&D Starter Set - the rules here don't include character creation, but they do include almost everything else you need. And, indeed, they're a bit easier to reference even than those rules in the Core Rulebook!

Following this is a set of character sheets for the nine core castmembers, plus twenty-one archetypes. I don't have much to say about these, except that I was pleased that the characters from the show are presented as "rules legal" characters - if you use the Core Rulebook's character creation method you can create a character exactly like Mal Reynolds (or the others). This is one of my bugbears, in that very often 'famous' characters are given exceptional stats or special abilities that PCs can never match. So it was good to see that avoided here.

Then we have the four adventures. Each of these is presented as a story, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. Indeed, each uses a Four Act structure, which allows them to fairly closely model the action in the show (where the ad breaks divide the acts).

On my read-through, this structure definitely suggested that the adventures would prove to be railroads - things should happen in order, with the PCs having little opportunity to deviate from the 'script'. However, I was surprised again in that in play this proved not to be the case - my players, at least, rapidly took the story off-course.

I do have a couple of nitpicks, though.

One is that there are a couple of rules mistakes. This is possibly explained by the adventures being developed in tandem with the game itself, but it was still a little jarring when some weapons were listed with a damage range when the game doesn't actually use them.

The adventures also mostly assume that players will be using the crew of Serenity when playing through them, to the extent that some even provide specific scenes tailored to individual characters (Wash and Inara in "Wedding Planners", for instance). This was something that the old Serenity RPG also did, and it strikes me as an odd decision, as I would have thought custom characters were the norm. That said, a GM should probably have little difficulty adjusting the adventures for his own crew.

But probably my biggest gripe was that each section of each adventure gave details of rolls that PCs could make, with suggested dice pools to use and results for failure, success, and extraordinary success. But these all followed a fairly repetitive formula, bloating the adventure text considerably.

All in all, I found this to be a good set of adventures, and to capture the feel of the show and the setting very well. Obviously, for GMs who don't use published adventures, there is little here of interest. However, for those who do, this is probably a good purchase, if only to have something they can pull out and play at short notice.

4 out of 5 rating for Thrillin' Heroics

Echoes of War – Thrillin’ Heroics is aimed at starters — and makes a couple missteps for it — but it couldn’t possibly have nailed the ‘Verse any better, and it’s surprisingly complete.

It includes a quick-play version of the Firefly Roleplaying Game core rules -- a great resource even if you have the Core Rulebook, as it's laid out in a more "standard" presentation, rather than spread among the series guide as a walkthrough -- as well as 4 full adventures and a bunch of pregenerated characters to play (including the Serenity crew!).

Read the full review at neuronphaser.com!