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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Anio" data-source="post: 2498012" data-attributes="member: 24200">Battle Armor II: Bigger, Tougher, Cooler - review by Jason Lund (Anio)Battle Armor II: Bigger, Tougher, Cooler (BA2) is a 26 page PDF (including 1 full colour cover page, 1 credits page, 1 table of contents, 1 page paper cut-out figures, 1 OGL page and 1 back cover page) written by Owen K.C. Stephens for Interactive Design Adventures. This is the second in their Battle Armor line that details a range of armour meant to bring a re-imagining of the iconic knight into the D20 Modern and D20 Future games.This product details twelve battle armours and three associated pieces of equipment that range from PL 4 to PL 8. Each suit of battle armour begins on its own page and is at least one page in length, with a drawing of each suit taking up roughly half of a page each.BA2 begins with four good content pages that provide the standard definitions for the range of battle armour, including the types of materials used in their construction, how equipment is built into or onto the armours and how battle armour may (or may not) affect CR. These definitions are general enough to cover all of the armours, without losing the detailed flexibility required for individual suits, and provide a common ground for a DM interested in developing their own battle armours. I am glad that the author chose to go this route rather than rehashing the same text for each type of battle armour because, as noted by the author, these standard definitions are included at the beginning in the interest of saving space. The real meat of BA2 doesn't begin until page eight, but is worth the wait. Complete statistics for each battle armour, including Defense, Movement rates, Dexterity modifiers, Abilities, Progress Level and Purchase DCs, are provided. Each armour type also has a description of its development history, in some cases going so far as to describe how each suit is developed and used at various Progress Levels. This is a nice touch and generally improves usability, especially considering that D20 Modern and D20 Future campaigns are run at a variety of technological levels. The battle armour descriptions further explain the various abilities, with abilities such as Unlimited Life Support and Force Fields firmly pushing these battle armours from science fact to science fiction.BA2 runs the full gamut of the battle armour genre and is rife with homages, with 1950s sci-fi battle armour pieces such as the Cavalier crafted in the style of Ironman and The Rocketeer, or the Gatecrasher and O.G.R.E battle armours that are easily at home in a mecha or battle suit anime. Most of the battle armours are directly designed for front-line combat, though without losing focus, the author also provides pieces such as the Datasuit for which the description of "battle armour" is something of a misnomer. Clearly, the range of battle armour uses is broad and several of these twelve suits could find use in a D20 Future game. The battle armours are as follows:* ARES Combat Suit, the Advanced Reconnaissance/Environment Suit (ARES), built around flight, mobility and data collection,* Berserker Bio-Arsenal, built around a simple medical sensor tied to two chemical injectors, one that goes off automatically if the wearer’s vital signs drop, the other triggered on command to flood the wearer’s system with performance enhancing pharmaceuticals,* Cavalier, an early attempt at powered battle armour designed in the 1950s Ironman-style,* Datasuit, a futuristic lightweight suit designed for battlefield computer experts, * Extreme Programming Uniform, a lightweight stylistic suit of armour designed for use in futuristic, televised, blood sports. This is a particular favourite of mine, both for the flavour and for the design,* Fallout Armor, a middleweight tool-suit designed for operatives working in an irradiated zone,* Gatecrasher, intimidating heavy combat armour designed for the plasma rifle-toting frontline soldier of the future, * Myrmidon Powered Armor, a heavy duty, strength-enhancing suit designed for the maximum survivability of a soldier,* O.G.R.E., Ordnance-Geared Robotic Exoskeleton, a suit of powered armour designed to turn the wearer into a walking tank, * Outlander Insertion Armor, a lightweight suit designed for missions sending the genetically engineered soldier deep into enemy territory. This is another favourite of mine, with the drawing looking like a survivalist human wearing a Predator suit (of the Predator movies),* Powered Battle Dress, middleweight flight armour designed as vacuum-fighting armour, EVA gear and as a sealed environmental suit, * Quarantine Enforcement Rig, a suit designed to protect the wearer from bio-weapons and to them to police and survive in quarantine zones.The three pieces of complementary equipment, the infection scanner, the linkpistol and the neural hookup, are each matched to particular battle armours and dovetail nicely into each suit concept.The artist, M. Newell Curlee, is clearly a fan of the genre: black and white representations of every piece of battle armour and associated equipment cover the range of battle armour styles, from the high-tech Ironman-look-alike Cavalier powered battle armour to the Voltron-like O.G.R.E. armour. The only poor piece is the drawing for the linkpistol that looks like a simplistic, overly cartoony ray gun, but this does not matter when the core of the product has been drawn so well. A dozen printable stand-up figures are included as a nice little bonus at the end of the product. I really like value-adds like these, especially for a concept as specific as futuristic battle armour.The cover and back pages are not printer-friendly, are likely to use a lot of printer ink and give the impression that BA2 was designed as a physical book. The editing is good, though the layout is in a two-column format with bordering and white spaces that further give the general impression that it was designed as a physical book rather than with the PDF market in mind. Another indicator that this product was not designed with the PDF market in mind is that it does not have bookmarks. Given its size and the number of individual components, I really expected good bookmarking for the entire product rather than needing to flick back and forth between the table of contents and the various battle armours.SummaryBattle Armor II: Bigger, Tougher, Cooler is a good homage to the battle suit genre and sure to find use in several D20 Future or D20 Modern games. As an homage, some of the ideas are less than original, but the broad and evocative range of battle suits runs the gamut of science fiction. The black and white artwork is very well suited to the battle armours and the inclusion of printable stand-up figures is a nice little value-add to the product. As a PDF, however, this product falls short. The front and back covers are not printer-friendly, the layout is more suitable to a physical book, the PDF does not include bookmarks and it is not screen-friendly. I would give Battle Armor II: Bigger, Tougher, Cooler a four star rating if it also included a PDF version more suitable for computer use, but drop it back to three stars for "forgetting" that it is a PDF and not a print product. Despite this, the content is good and should be very easy to drop into a game.Review by Jason Lund (Anio)</blockquote>

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