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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crothian" data-source="post: 2030183" data-attributes="member: 232">Grimm    Role playing has always had a bit of a fairy tale theme for me.  It seems the innocence of the stories and the development of the character and the mystery of the unknown falls right in line.  The cautionary tales and the lessons to be learned though are rarely a part, but still I know a few people who should have learned something from their role playing experience.  Grimm captures the faerie tale element since it is gaming in the lands of Fairy tales.      Grimm is a paper back book by Fantasy Flight Games.  They are best known for their Midnight setting but have produced many solid books and are usually a safe company to go with.  Grimm is sixty two pages of black and white normal pages.  The book seems small at first but it does not take long to realize that everything is practically packed into this pint size product.  The art is really good and has nice fairy tale images and pictures of the familiar characters.      Grimm is a game of children taken to the land of Fairy Tales.  Now, that does not mean it is exactly designed to play with children.  Some of the Fairy Tales are actually quite horrific and it would really not be hard to make this game a rather scary horror version of these Fairy Tales.  The game uses basic d20  rules but it really simplifies them  A basic understand of d20 or the rule books is needed to play other then that it is a stand alone product.  The book has new classes in it and the old classes will not work for the game.  The classes are child stereotypes like the Bully, the Outcast, the normal kid etc.  .  Each class is only 6 levels long as it is not designed to be a game about power or much character advancement.  The genius about the classes though is the character learns and gains abilities as it does.  The Bully for instance eventually learns that he needs to protect the weaker kids and his abilities reflect that.  The skills are quite fewer with sneak and notice taking the place of a few better known skills and the introduction of things like Boy Scout Stuff and Home Ec to represent some more modern learning the kids possess.  There are quite a few new feats and a small list of old feats that can be used in the game.  Characters gain feats every second level instead of every third.      Imagination sis of course an important part of what kids do and the game takes that and really makes it useful.  Each class gets a different amount of imagination points. These points can be spent to change the lay of land or cause small things like minor healing or a useful item to happen to be near by.  It is a great little mechanic and simple to use.  Now the system doesn’t work as well with magic.  Instead of creating new spells for the setting they decided to allow some spells from the PHB.  The spells work but not as well as one created specifically for the setting would.  I really would have liked to see a better magical system.    The book takes the Fairy Tales that most people now and expands them.  What happened in the tales has happened and now the children are exploring the lands the build off of the tales they know.  And no one had a happy ending.  Rapunzel is now dead but poisonous spiders invest the decaying corpse; a nasty surprise for anyone who climbs her still ropey like hair.  Cinderella ended up killing her prince and now makes her step sisters work for her.  She is now cruel and sadistic.  Little Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue have joined forces and are now slavers.  That’s just three examples of the dark turn they have given the Fairy Tales.  It is interesting how the stories turned out but so many of them are darker then the original Fairy Tales.  It would have been nice for a more of a mix but there defiantly is plenty of potential for conflict.      Grimm is a really interesting take of the Fairy Tales and offers some great rules and options for playing kids.  Everything turned out a little darker then I wanted and the magic system really could have been better.  However, this is a very creative product, self contained, and should offer some fun possibilities that are different from most other role playing game,</blockquote>

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