Well, I stopped by my FLGS today. Several of them, actually. I never get to actually shop retail, as I ordinarily live in bum**** nowhere. Both places I stopped had SO MUCH stuff it took me an hour just to find what I was looking for. Way too much stuff published these days.
ANYWAY, they had the Hogshead crime scene stuff. And, yea ... the biggest problem with it is it's horribly out of date and pure d20.
I suppose if you wanted to run a PURE CSI game it might be interesting, but most of it is creating classes, PrCs, skills, feats, etc etc to create, from the ground up, a d20 based investigation game. I suppose this would be okay, but it would take alot of conversion or adding of skills to an already skill-heavy d20Modern game.
I decided not to buy it, as I spent 80 bucks on stuff already today and from my page-through it seemed like it wouldn't be of much use to me. Some creative DCs and description on the part of the DM and you're good enough to go with d20Modern and "Investigate". I didn't think I needed a seperate skill called "Blood Spatter Analysis".
For those of you running a pure CSI campaign, you might want to look into it a little more at your FLGS. You might need a seperate skill for bone analysis, blood spatter analysis, etc etc. Dunno.
EDIT: Just thought of something, thought I'd add it in there. If you're predominantly interested in the HOW and the WHY of crime scene investigation and police procedure ... and death and mystery and writing a good mystery, I'd suggest the "Howdunit" series from F&W. They're about 11 years old at this point, but it's a collection of writer's resource books telling writers what they need to know to write knowledgably about crime. I see writing adventures, GOOD adventures, to be just another story. That's why we're "Storytellers" as often as "Game Masters" or anything else. You'd probably like "Scene of the Crime". I'm contemplating picking them up if I can find them at a used book store around here.
EDIT EDIT: Mmm, it looks like they released a book called "Howdunit", from Writer's Digest (who released the later books in the series) that's a compilation of the other books ... well, a condensation and collection, anyway. I imagine that one would be a great read for a GM wanting to run good investigative games.
--fje
