Adventure!

[thormagni]

Just in case anyone was curious, I finally did get the Adventure! d20 book Monday and got my review finished for Gaming Report/Game Trade magazine (my first review for the actual magazine, yay me! I think it comes out in next month's issue.) I was a big fan of the original Storyteller version (and the Aeonverse in general) and it doesn't actually hit the streets until next month, so I was pretty excited to get a sneak peek. Hopefully I will get to review Aberrant d20, White Wolf's non-superhero superhero game before it comes out too. That would be sweet.

Overall review, interesting but not perfect. Some really neat stuff (a Warren Ellis short story, new classes, skills, feats, a system for minor super-powers and super-science) some stuff that was not so neat (no index, no glossary, relying on D&D3.5 for a near-modern game, no character creation outline) and some stuff that was just frustrating but not a deal-breaker (no sample characters, no villains or lackeys, no intro adventure, no monsters, no character sheet.) But overall, looks like it could be a fun game and you can't really beat the background and setting material. I woulda bought it and would still recommend it.

I'm supposed to be getting a box in the mail any day now with more review materials, but I have no idea what those might be. Hopefully something cool.

 

[InzeladunMaster]

Does the text capture the feel of the period? (Isn't Ellis a modern day comic-book writer/plotter? I wonder why they didn't get the rights to reprint an actual pulp story from the period.)

 

[thormagni]

I think Warren Ellis was chosen because his hot book at the time was Planetary, which backtracks often to that time period.

I think the text does a pretty good job of capturing White Wolf's view of their version of a pulp era game. It really is meant as an intro to their Aeonverse and concentrates on the characters of that world, rather than any real-world pulp novel or magazine characters. So, you could clearly make a character in that pulp vein (whether Tarzan or the Shadow or the Phantom or Doc Savage or whoever) easily with these rules, but I think it is geared toward their own particular universe. Could it be used for a generic d20 pulp game? Sure.

The "problem" of their game rules being tailored to their universe gets worse in the Aberrant line. They have a very specific world mapped out, where super-beings have a tendency to go stark, raving bonkers from channelling quantum energy (the stuff that bends reality and makes all superpowers happen.) I personally LIKED the original Aberrant game and the associated world but it is possible to play a "straight" superhero game with the rules if you ignore the effects of taint (the personality- and appearance-twisting effect of the quantum energy.)

Really though, both Adventure! and Aberrant share a lot of themes and style similarities with Ellis' work on Planetary, Stormwatch and The Authority. Kind of a post-modern, decadent, take on super-powered beings.

Does the text capture the feel of the period? (Isn't Ellis a modern day comic-book writer/plotter? I wonder why they didn't get the rights to reprint an actual pulp story from the period.)