John Cooper
Explorer
THE ART OF WOR ADVENTURE ART PACK SET 1: ELVEN WOMEN VOLUME 1
By Jeff Walker and Dave Wainio
Three Sages Games product number 3SG-4001
$15.95
Three Sages Games has come out with a series of loose-page compilations of NPCs, magic items, and short adventure scenarios for their Art of Wor campaign setting. (Although the packaging carries the "d20" logo, the product was created for a set of variant rules that branches off from the OGL material produced by Wizards of the Coast.) At present, there are four products in the product line: Elven Women, Human Women, Elven Men, and Human Men. (Each also has "Volume 1" in its title, so presumably after hitting the other races, Three Sages Games may well revisit race/gender combinations they've already hit once.)
Let's cut to the chase, shall we? I not only cannot recommend Elven Women Volume 1, I feel it my duty to actively warn you away from wasting $15.95 on a product with such shoddy craftsmanship. Simply put, Elven Women Volume 1, in its finished and ready-to-purchase form, looks more like a first draft, and a very rough first draft at that. To ask $5.00 for a product of this inherently low quality seems a bit on the wishful thinking side of things on the part of its creators; to expect $15.95 smacks of sheer audacity.
Let's see what you'd be getting for your $15.95, shall we? (I'll mention right now that I received a free review copy, and thus did not waste any of my hard-earned money on this product.) Elven Women Volume 1 contains the following:
Let's go to the credits page, shall we? Jeff Walker and Dave Wainio provide the interior text; Steven Ong is the art director and product coordinator; David also multitasks as the cover designer and interior layout guy. (These three are also credited as having written the original source material from Alia-Wor and Rules of Wor; it's a safe bet that they're the eponymous "three sages" from which the company derives its name.) Faeding Light Studios (yes, it's spelled that way) provides the computer-generated artwork. Nowhere is there listed a proofreader or an editor, and boy does it ever show! I have no trouble with a trio of gaming fans deciding to pool their resources and talent to create a small RPG company, but if neither of them brings any particular skill in spelling, proofreading, or editing (and it's fairly obvious reading through this product that they don't), then for God's sake, hire out! Or get a friend with some skill in these areas to read over your work before foisting it off on an unsuspecting public!
Elven Women Volume 1 is simply riddled with errors, to the point where sometimes it's a chore figuring out what the authors mean in a given sentence, and some passages come across as having been written by someone for whom English is a second language. These guys seem to have no understanding of the correct use of the apostrophe; seem allergic to commas (or are simply more partial to run-on sentences); appear to enjoy putting sentence fragments into parentheses at the end of a sentence (and then slapping a period after the closing parenthesis); don't realize that you need to put quotation marks at the beginning of every new paragraph when there's a multi-paragraph quote by a single individual; and frequently use the wrong word in a sentence. (Examples? How about "found" instead of "fond," "loose" instead of "lose," "was" instead of "were," "undertaking" instead of "undertaken," "powerful" instead of "power," "a" instead of "an," "lead" instead of "led," "supplement" instead of "supplemented," "devise" instead of "device," "silent" instead of "silently," "wetted" instead of "whetted," "know" instead of "known," "function" instead of "functions," "least" instead of "lest," "the" instead of "they," "memorized" instead of "prepared," "straight" instead of "strait," "arrive" instead of "arrived," "follows" instead of "followers," "non" instead of "none," "repair" instead of "heal," "devises" instead of "devices," and "core" instead of "cure.") Similarly, their spelling is atrocious, as we get several classics such as "langauges," "uttercap," and "elixer" - and they even manage to misspell the name of a god that they themselves created: Natallon, an elven god, is spelled "Nattalon" in one instance. These mistakes are simply inexcusable in an allegedly "professional" product, as a simple spellchecker program would have caught the misspelled words at the very least; apparently the "three sages" couldn't be bothered to even do that minimal level of proofreading. And that's just the standard English language rules they're messing up; I haven't even mentioned their complete disregard for the standard d20 conventions like italicizing (instead of capitalizing) spell names and the names of magic items, capitalizing size categories and the names of skills and feats, and not capitalizing character class names.
The names are pretty poor in Elven Women Volume 1 as well. They only have to come up with six different names for their six profiled characters, so I'm curious why they have one with the last name of "Gauldre" and another with the last name of "Gauldron." Their imaginations couldn't come up with anything less derivative? Probably not, since the first character is a shy elf named "Shyra," and another feels alienated and is named "Aliena." The topper for me, though, was when I read (in one of the mini-adventures) of an ogre barbarian named...Troy. Wow. There's also a group of trackers called the "Eagle Scouts" - way to evoke images of the Boy Scouts of America into my D&D game! Sadly, they can't even keep their own names straight, as there's a mountain range sometimes called "the Spines Mountains" and other times called "the Spineback Mountains," and the adventure featuring Aliena Skylark is labeled "Tyra Gauldron Scenario." (Tyra's one of the other NPCs in this Adventure Art Pack Set.)
None of the adventures really grabbed me, and some were downright awful. I think the worst was "The Wrath of Ra," in which a sun god sends a powerful burst of energy through the shield of one of his just-slain worshipers (to destroy the enemies who had just killed him), and then - get this - forgot to "shut off" the link, so now heat energy is emanating from the shield in an ever-expanding rate. The only way to stop it is to touch the shield with another sun-god-based magic item. Enter Lorialla Sunarche, who carries around the Sun Mask of Natallon, an artifact that her church decided she should carry around with her on her adventures because she seems to have "bonded" with it. The adventure calls out for the PCs to have casually met up with Lorialla earlier, and when they discover they need a sun-god-related magic item, they're to recall Lorialla and her magic mask. Here's an actual quote from the adventure: "If the players fail to remember Lorialla at that point smack them in the head and then remind them." There's not much to like about the adventure, from the idiotically-forgetful sun god, to the ham-handed approach to get Lorialla into the adventure, to the fact that if the PCs can't figure out what to do, "a Paladin wanders by with his own powerful sun god item and keeps the region from getting burned to a crisp." Great, an adventure where the PCs aren't really needed at all!
The adventure maps are poorly done, looking like they were made with a rather simple graphics program and a few pieces of clip art (in the case of the trees). Medium-sized monsters don't even always get planted in a single square; many of them are haphazardly straddling two different squares as their starting spots. Ruins are always depicted as broken Greek columns, and a "coffin" shape doubles as both coffins and a shield.
The creature stats are laughable, as they don't include half of the information needed to actually run them. Here's the complete first stat from the first adventure (with spacing copied exactly as it appears in the finished product):
I've probably made my case for avoiding this product, but lest this be a completely negative review, I should point out that if there's one place where Elven Women Volume 1 shines it's in the magic items. I'm going to assume (and I trust I'll be corrected if this isn't the case) that art director Steven Ong found six images of elven women that he liked from Faeding Light Studios and the "three sages" based the product around them, as opposed to having the images created especially for this product. (I say this only because most start-up RPG companies like this rarely have the resources to commission expensive artwork at first.) Therefore, the authors had to create their magic items based solely on what the pre-existing character portraits are wearing/carrying. They did a really good job working under these constraints, coming up with a pretty decent variety of magic items, especially since so many of the images were apparently designed for the "cheesecake factor" much more than for the concept of creating a reasonably-attired adventurer. (Two of the characters are wearing loose partial-tops where the bottoms of their breasts are completely uncovered - and they're in danger of exposing their "mammalian protuberances" at the slightest breeze - and one of those two wears only a skimpy G-string with a see-through gauze half-skirt covering her butt.) I particularly liked the Eagle Scout piecemeal armor (although I groan at the name "Eagle Scout"), where different pieces of the armor grant different bonuses and still stack their armor bonuses with each other, so that the more pieces you own, the better your armor protection becomes (and you get a bunch of cool side benefits as well). It's just a shame that the rest of this product didn't turn out as well as the magic item sections.
Sadly, I really cannot recommend Elven Women Volume 1, and I think a "1" is about as high as I can go as far as a review score. Since this is the first entry in this product line, it's entirely possible that subsequent Adventure Art Packs have a substantially higher level of quality, but I'm not predisposed to checking them out and seeing for myself.
By Jeff Walker and Dave Wainio
Three Sages Games product number 3SG-4001
$15.95
Three Sages Games has come out with a series of loose-page compilations of NPCs, magic items, and short adventure scenarios for their Art of Wor campaign setting. (Although the packaging carries the "d20" logo, the product was created for a set of variant rules that branches off from the OGL material produced by Wizards of the Coast.) At present, there are four products in the product line: Elven Women, Human Women, Elven Men, and Human Men. (Each also has "Volume 1" in its title, so presumably after hitting the other races, Three Sages Games may well revisit race/gender combinations they've already hit once.)
Let's cut to the chase, shall we? I not only cannot recommend Elven Women Volume 1, I feel it my duty to actively warn you away from wasting $15.95 on a product with such shoddy craftsmanship. Simply put, Elven Women Volume 1, in its finished and ready-to-purchase form, looks more like a first draft, and a very rough first draft at that. To ask $5.00 for a product of this inherently low quality seems a bit on the wishful thinking side of things on the part of its creators; to expect $15.95 smacks of sheer audacity.
Let's see what you'd be getting for your $15.95, shall we? (I'll mention right now that I received a free review copy, and thus did not waste any of my hard-earned money on this product.) Elven Women Volume 1 contains the following:
- A cover sheet reusing one of the six images from inside, with a credits page on the other side of the sheet.
- A blank "Rules of Wor" d20 character sheet that leaves out standard d20 rules information to make room for the variant rules stuff (more on these variant rules later).
- Six full-page, full-color portraits of six female elf characters, printed on glossy paper. These are computer graphics images, and as such look like screen shots from a World of Warcraft or Everquest game (although I'm sure they were created from scratch). My copy reads "STORE SAMPLE ONLY" and "NOT FOR RESALE" in big letters along the bottom of each picture; I'm not sure if the package I received was a "demo" for store use, or if the versions for consumer purchase are going to have that verbiage along the bottom of the pictures as well. The other side of these six sheets is blank.
- Six background pages, one for each of the characters, describing their physical traits, personality, combat skills, magic skills, mundane skills, interests, and background. There's also a black-and-white smaller version of each character's artwork on the page. On the back sides of these sheets are the descriptions of six different magic items, as each character has a new magic item. Most of these magic item descriptions take up half a page or less; the rest of the page is blank.
- Six adventure pages (front and back), with crudely-drawn maps and only partial stats at best. To their credit, the authors at least filled these six pages up front to back, and they each incorporate one of the six characters, but in most cases these are side treks at best, not likely to last the "2-4 hours" as described on the back "cover" of the product (unless the 2-4 hours was meant to encompass all six adventures taken as a whole).
- Six "Rules of Wor d20 Character Sheets" filled out with the game stats of the six elven women.
- A final page that has the Open Game License and a chart converting the "verbal attribute descriptions" of the characters into game stats for games using the d20, "101-100" (which I assume is meant to be "1-100"), 1-20, 2d6, and 1-30 ranges. The back side of this sheet is the back cover blurb, with smaller images of the six pieces of full-color artwork.
- Two pieces of page-sized cardboard to prevent the product from getting bent or otherwise damaged.
Let's go to the credits page, shall we? Jeff Walker and Dave Wainio provide the interior text; Steven Ong is the art director and product coordinator; David also multitasks as the cover designer and interior layout guy. (These three are also credited as having written the original source material from Alia-Wor and Rules of Wor; it's a safe bet that they're the eponymous "three sages" from which the company derives its name.) Faeding Light Studios (yes, it's spelled that way) provides the computer-generated artwork. Nowhere is there listed a proofreader or an editor, and boy does it ever show! I have no trouble with a trio of gaming fans deciding to pool their resources and talent to create a small RPG company, but if neither of them brings any particular skill in spelling, proofreading, or editing (and it's fairly obvious reading through this product that they don't), then for God's sake, hire out! Or get a friend with some skill in these areas to read over your work before foisting it off on an unsuspecting public!
Elven Women Volume 1 is simply riddled with errors, to the point where sometimes it's a chore figuring out what the authors mean in a given sentence, and some passages come across as having been written by someone for whom English is a second language. These guys seem to have no understanding of the correct use of the apostrophe; seem allergic to commas (or are simply more partial to run-on sentences); appear to enjoy putting sentence fragments into parentheses at the end of a sentence (and then slapping a period after the closing parenthesis); don't realize that you need to put quotation marks at the beginning of every new paragraph when there's a multi-paragraph quote by a single individual; and frequently use the wrong word in a sentence. (Examples? How about "found" instead of "fond," "loose" instead of "lose," "was" instead of "were," "undertaking" instead of "undertaken," "powerful" instead of "power," "a" instead of "an," "lead" instead of "led," "supplement" instead of "supplemented," "devise" instead of "device," "silent" instead of "silently," "wetted" instead of "whetted," "know" instead of "known," "function" instead of "functions," "least" instead of "lest," "the" instead of "they," "memorized" instead of "prepared," "straight" instead of "strait," "arrive" instead of "arrived," "follows" instead of "followers," "non" instead of "none," "repair" instead of "heal," "devises" instead of "devices," and "core" instead of "cure.") Similarly, their spelling is atrocious, as we get several classics such as "langauges," "uttercap," and "elixer" - and they even manage to misspell the name of a god that they themselves created: Natallon, an elven god, is spelled "Nattalon" in one instance. These mistakes are simply inexcusable in an allegedly "professional" product, as a simple spellchecker program would have caught the misspelled words at the very least; apparently the "three sages" couldn't be bothered to even do that minimal level of proofreading. And that's just the standard English language rules they're messing up; I haven't even mentioned their complete disregard for the standard d20 conventions like italicizing (instead of capitalizing) spell names and the names of magic items, capitalizing size categories and the names of skills and feats, and not capitalizing character class names.
The names are pretty poor in Elven Women Volume 1 as well. They only have to come up with six different names for their six profiled characters, so I'm curious why they have one with the last name of "Gauldre" and another with the last name of "Gauldron." Their imaginations couldn't come up with anything less derivative? Probably not, since the first character is a shy elf named "Shyra," and another feels alienated and is named "Aliena." The topper for me, though, was when I read (in one of the mini-adventures) of an ogre barbarian named...Troy. Wow. There's also a group of trackers called the "Eagle Scouts" - way to evoke images of the Boy Scouts of America into my D&D game! Sadly, they can't even keep their own names straight, as there's a mountain range sometimes called "the Spines Mountains" and other times called "the Spineback Mountains," and the adventure featuring Aliena Skylark is labeled "Tyra Gauldron Scenario." (Tyra's one of the other NPCs in this Adventure Art Pack Set.)
None of the adventures really grabbed me, and some were downright awful. I think the worst was "The Wrath of Ra," in which a sun god sends a powerful burst of energy through the shield of one of his just-slain worshipers (to destroy the enemies who had just killed him), and then - get this - forgot to "shut off" the link, so now heat energy is emanating from the shield in an ever-expanding rate. The only way to stop it is to touch the shield with another sun-god-based magic item. Enter Lorialla Sunarche, who carries around the Sun Mask of Natallon, an artifact that her church decided she should carry around with her on her adventures because she seems to have "bonded" with it. The adventure calls out for the PCs to have casually met up with Lorialla earlier, and when they discover they need a sun-god-related magic item, they're to recall Lorialla and her magic mask. Here's an actual quote from the adventure: "If the players fail to remember Lorialla at that point smack them in the head and then remind them." There's not much to like about the adventure, from the idiotically-forgetful sun god, to the ham-handed approach to get Lorialla into the adventure, to the fact that if the PCs can't figure out what to do, "a Paladin wanders by with his own powerful sun god item and keeps the region from getting burned to a crisp." Great, an adventure where the PCs aren't really needed at all!
The adventure maps are poorly done, looking like they were made with a rather simple graphics program and a few pieces of clip art (in the case of the trees). Medium-sized monsters don't even always get planted in a single square; many of them are haphazardly straddling two different squares as their starting spots. Ruins are always depicted as broken Greek columns, and a "coffin" shape doubles as both coffins and a shield.
The creature stats are laughable, as they don't include half of the information needed to actually run them. Here's the complete first stat from the first adventure (with spacing copied exactly as it appears in the finished product):
Gizz'Nir (Drider)
HD:6d8+18 (55), INIT:+2, PSR:14, SPD:30, PM:(15) 10,7,3,0; AC 17, 2 Daggers +5 (SF 5, 1d6+3) or shortbow (SF6, 1d8).Full Attack:SR 9/2 daggers or 8 or 1 with bow.
That's it. Saving throws? Ability scores? Skills? Feats? Touch and flat-footed AC values? Apparently not essential, according to the "three sages." Oh, and if you don't recognize some of the terms in the stat block above, it's because they're the variant rules stuff that the Art of Wor uses. From what I gather, they break initiative down to where each player gets multiple actions on various "phases" of each round - I don't claim to understand the whole concept, as it isn't explained fully here. However, the last page of Elven Women Volume 1 states that if you're not using the "Rules of Wor" concepts of strike ranks, speed factors, or phased movement ranks you should just ignore those bits. However, it's a bit harder to just ignore the fact that the "Rules of Wor" - and the six character sheets already filled out for the user - do not include such basic information as touch and flat-footed armor classes, nor are ability score modifiers factored into the saving throws, as "they may or may not apply depending on the circumstances." Have you ever heard of a d20 game where you don't get to apply your Dexterity bonus to your Reflex save? Likewise, they've determined that they're not going to factor in synergy bonus or armor check penalties to any of their skill point totals on the character sheets. All of these modifications may be perfectly fine for those intending to use this product in a "Rules of Wor" campaign, but the product might as well have "WARNING: THIS PRODUCT IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH STANDARD D20 RULES" stamped on its cover in big, bold letters.HD:6d8+18 (55), INIT:+2, PSR:14, SPD:30, PM:(15) 10,7,3,0; AC 17, 2 Daggers +5 (SF 5, 1d6+3) or shortbow (SF6, 1d8).Full Attack:SR 9/2 daggers or 8 or 1 with bow.
I've probably made my case for avoiding this product, but lest this be a completely negative review, I should point out that if there's one place where Elven Women Volume 1 shines it's in the magic items. I'm going to assume (and I trust I'll be corrected if this isn't the case) that art director Steven Ong found six images of elven women that he liked from Faeding Light Studios and the "three sages" based the product around them, as opposed to having the images created especially for this product. (I say this only because most start-up RPG companies like this rarely have the resources to commission expensive artwork at first.) Therefore, the authors had to create their magic items based solely on what the pre-existing character portraits are wearing/carrying. They did a really good job working under these constraints, coming up with a pretty decent variety of magic items, especially since so many of the images were apparently designed for the "cheesecake factor" much more than for the concept of creating a reasonably-attired adventurer. (Two of the characters are wearing loose partial-tops where the bottoms of their breasts are completely uncovered - and they're in danger of exposing their "mammalian protuberances" at the slightest breeze - and one of those two wears only a skimpy G-string with a see-through gauze half-skirt covering her butt.) I particularly liked the Eagle Scout piecemeal armor (although I groan at the name "Eagle Scout"), where different pieces of the armor grant different bonuses and still stack their armor bonuses with each other, so that the more pieces you own, the better your armor protection becomes (and you get a bunch of cool side benefits as well). It's just a shame that the rest of this product didn't turn out as well as the magic item sections.
Sadly, I really cannot recommend Elven Women Volume 1, and I think a "1" is about as high as I can go as far as a review score. Since this is the first entry in this product line, it's entirely possible that subsequent Adventure Art Packs have a substantially higher level of quality, but I'm not predisposed to checking them out and seeing for myself.
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