Hot Pursuit
By Corey Reid
Adamant Entertainment product number ADM2005
42-page PDF, $6.50
Hot Pursuit is an interesting little PDF devoted to the subject of chases. It's the first product I've seen by either author Corey Reid (perhaps better well known as "barsoomcore" on the EN World messageboards) or Adamant Entertainment, but Hot Pursuit will forever after make me look favorable on works by either.
The cover art is a simple piece showing a fast car, a spaceship, and 3 horses with riders, all superimposed upon a "red leather" background. It does a good job of getting across the idea that this PDF is meant to cover all types of d20 RPGs, whatever the genre, but is perhaps less effective at getting across the concept of "the chase," as only the mounted riders seem to be doing any chasing - the speeding car and speeding spacecraft are each solo. In any case, it's a nice piece, and I wish I could give credit where credit is due, but the only information the PDF gives about the cover art is "Artwork courtesy of Jupitermedia Corporation."
The interior artwork consists of 16 black-and-white illustrations of varying degrees of quality, again, with no hint as to who the individual artists might have been. Some of these are quite obviously paintings (like the horseback chase scene on page 33), while some are intricately detailed pen-and-ink drawings (the camelback skirmish on page 11), and some, like the car chase on page 12, are very simple line drawings with no attempts at shading. (That last one was badly pixelated, too, meaning it was probably blown up to its current size from a much smaller drawing.) We also get one instance of rerun artwork, when two of the horseback rider silhouettes from the cover show up on page 6. I also wonder about the ground stability of the gyrocopter on page 26, which seems to only sport two wheels. (Must make landings a bit difficult!) Taken as a whole, I'd put the artwork in Hot Pursuit at about average.
As for the proofreading and editing, I noted quite a few picky little errors (the kind that nitpickers like myself find irritating), but according to an EN World thread about this PDF quite a few of these have already been pointed out to the author/editor, and apparently they already are being (or soon will be) corrected. I'll still go ahead and pass on the list I compiled to Adamant, since I'm going off of the "alpha release" version of the PDF.
Okay, with that out of the way, it's time to get to the heart of the matter: the actual written content of Hot Pursuit. The short version: I was impressed. How impressed? Impressed enough to adopt this chase system into my own games, for one. Corey has done a great job in creating a cohesive set of rules allowing the DM to run his players' characters through all sorts of exciting chases. (The term "cinematic" has seen a lot of use recently, perhaps even bordering on overuse, but that's a pretty good term to use for the way he's set up the chases.) Several things really pleased me as to the way he went about these rules:
* No Maps. Good call there, as I think having everything laid out for everyone to see would diminish the experience. (If you're going for a "cinematic experience," there's no cinema like the one in your mind's eye!) Also, with the speeds commonly attained during chase scenes, doing this on a battlemat would be problematic at best.
* Genre generic. By taking the generic approach, Corey has widened the utility of the product, since it's equally usable by players of D&D, d20 Modern, d20 Future, or the upcoming d20 Past. Really, as long as you're using a d20 system, this product will be useful to you. (I could also see it being of use to games using other systems, as it's really not a complicated system once you break it down and it could probably be tweaked into other systems with little effort.)
* Examples. Examples always help when learning a new rule, and Corey's given us an ongoing example throughout the PDF that picks up where it last left off, which not coincidentally is right at the time that the latest rules concept is about to come into play.
I also have to comment upon Corey's writing style. It's very laid back, and reading through it almost makes it feel as if Corey's there in the room with you, explaining the material verbally. He's rather a whimsical writer, too, as best exemplified by his use of the "+4 fruit cart bonus," which grants a chase participant a bonus to their Crash checks after smashing through a fruit cart (in an obvious homage to countless movies with chase scenes, where fruit cart vendors always seem to have targets painted on their wares).
If I have to point to anything negative in Hot Pursuit, it would be that the material is geared much more heavily not only toward chases between people in vehicles and/or mounted on animals (as opposed to chases on foot), but also much more toward land-based chases than chases through other environments. Sure, Corey makes a nod toward chases on water, in the air, and in space, but there's not a lot of material there. (The "In Outer Space" section starts out "Honestly, you're kind of on your own here.") On the plus side, he's also noted (on the EN World messageboards) that there's a good possibility that he might come up with some further supplements that will look at chases in these other environments.
I also have some nitpicking to do on the fact that there are three types of maneuvers (chase, passenger, and obstacle), but "Hard Brake" is both a chase maneuver and an obstacle maneuver; worse yet, the two maneuvers have different characteristics. I think that renaming one of them might dispel some potential confusion in this area.
As a whole, though, I feel Hot Pursuit rates strongly in the "high 4 (Good)" range. It's a nice product that fills a niche not really covered all that well in the core rules (well, in the D&D core rules, anyway - I'm not familiar with the d20 Modern core rules, but I'm willing to bet they're pretty similar) and covers its material well. I'll be keeping an eye out for anything further Corey Reid might write in the future; with Hot Pursuit, he's made my "writers to check out" list.
It would have been great if they included both a "screen" and "printer-friendly" version. I'm not a publisher, but I can't imagine it's too tough to do. Maybe there are issues I am unaware of.
