In Brief: Laying The Smackdown is a combat supplement for Cryptosnark's superb D20 superhero role playing game Deeds Not Words. It purports to be a book of new combat techniques, but like all of Cryptosnark's products it's actually crammed with all kinds of material. Not only do we have piles of new combat feats, rules that cover holes in the D&D combat system (how do you determine whether or not o super-strong guy can tip something really big over onto an opponent? How much damage should it do if he hits?) but also scads of new equipment, two complete organizations and about fifty pre-made NPC antagonists, organized in order of their challenge rating. As with previous books from Cryptosnark, this is an amazing amount of value for $5.
Let me say it right here, before we even start to address the questions of what I did and didn't like. This is an superb book, the most original superhero supplement I have seen in a long time and maybe the best. It introduces a whole new genre of superhero gaming, based on head-to-head fighting games, old martial arts movies and the mythology of professional wrestling, as well as 50 of the best superhero NPCs I've seen and scads of other cool stuff. If that's enough for you, then read no further, go over to RPGNow.com and grab a copy right now.(for five bucks!!!??) For those of you who want to know the details, read on.
What it Contains: This is a huge text, divided into roughly three sections. The first lists new combat feats and maneuvers, with a strong emphasis on simulating various real-world martial arts. Specific martial art styles are actually assigned specific feats, with complex prerequisites to keep the really devastating ones out of the hands of novice characters. The second section contains new combat maneuvers and equipment, and tries to simulate all kinds of comic-book moves that D&D 3E overlooks, presumably because you wouldn't normally see them in a fantasy game. The third section details two different underground fighting circuits, an underground wrestling federation which specializes in superhuman bouts, and the sinister Shadow Tournament, which has pitted the world's greatest champions against one another in secret for centuries. It details the history, origins, rules and leaders of both organizations. This is followed by stats and descriptions on about fifty NPCs you might fight if you entered either tournament.
The first section is an amazing feat of number juggling. It's very tricky to introduce all these new feats without hopelessly overbalancing the game, particularly the martial arts. The author does a marvelous job of steering He's in fine form here, his fun, ironic, self-deprecating style is very much in evidence and he manages to make most of the feats amusing as well as useful.(quote: "Which enables the Revered master to dole out copious amounts of whup-ass to all and sundry").
It is an interesting idea to classify entire martial arts styles as single feats, codifying their strengths and weaknesses succinctly, in just a few numbers. There are combat feats available only to practitioners of particular styles ("Ha! So that's the Crane School's Iron Palm Technique! It is as nothing beside my Wing Chung school thousand-lotus-blossom strike! Ha ha ha!") When a character has practiced a given art long enough, they may meet the prerequisites for "mastery" of that style which opens up a whole new set of feats to be acquired. The different individual feats are balanced with great care, so that a master of, for example, Jeet Kune Doh will be roughly the equal of a master of Muay Thai kickboxing, but they will know different techniques and have subtly different strengths and weaknesses.
The author's knowledge of the subject matter is impressively broad (if you're a big fan of some obscure style like Indonesian Petjak Silat, it's probably in here) but he doesn't go overboard with the minutiae, either. The same is true with his list of new combat rules. He has just enough to cover the situations that the Players' Handbook leaves out (two guys hurling cars at one another, tipping a water tower over onto your opponent, trying to destroy it with your eye-beams before it crushes some innocent bystanders, etc) but he wisely avoids giving us too much number-crunching. Just some simple ways to resolve super-combat situations.
A list of new equipment follows, and it's a lot of fun. In addition to a whole pile of martial arts weapons, it includes game stats on every conceivable silly trick arrow that a super-archer might keep in his quiver (all solemnly described with a straight face)
We move on to campaign material, designed to help us build a whole series around nothing but tournament fights. This is a startlingly radical idea, which seems to owe more to head-to head fighting games like Tekken or Mortal Combat than to traditional superhero gaming. The plot arc would function like the back-story in a head-to-head combat video game, in between the fights but determined by them.
We then get information on two different international contests that our PCs might participate in, fighting bout after bout, slowing working their way up past tougher and tougher opponents, toward the prize. One is a little like the World Wrestling Federation on radioactive steroids, except that both the bouts and the insane soap-opera storylines are real. The other is a sinister, secretive martial arts championship, run by the fiendish Madam Wisdom, which meets in odd locations around the globe to determine the world's greatest champion (it bears a strange resemblance to the video game Streetfighter 2).
Both tournaments seem to exist in the same universe, and a PC could easily participate in both, perhaps even at the same time. Neither contest is described in enormous detail-we never see floor plans of Madame Wisdom's secret lair, or an organizational chart of her minions, but we get enough. You could pick up the book and start a "contest of champions" campaign with little to no extra effort. Just sketch out a few locations and bring on the opposition. Which brings us to the last section of the book.
The wrestling match format allows the writer to conveniently organize the villains into weight categories. "Lightweight" "Middleweight" "Heavyweight" "Superheavyweight" and so forth. If you wanted to use these NPCs for some other kind of game, this makes it incredibly simple to grab the right one for the job. There are a few lighter-weight characters (the "China Doll" for example) who are surprisingly deadly, thanks to the specific nature of their powers, so watch them carefully. The NPC antagonists actually seem to be organized in the order in which a player might face them, which is also a nice touch. Each one has multiple sets of stats, in case you would like to make them tougher or weaker to suit a particular game.
What I liked: Although this book is crammed with cool new stuff, you don't actually need it to play a satisfying game of Deeds Not Words. Too often a game's firs major supplement will be a disorganized jumble of systems and rule corrections that you can't play the game without, but which aren't in any useful order. This is the opposite of that. It's rigorously organized, but all totally modular.
This is probably Scott Lynch's best writing to date, funny, thoughtful and warm. He clearly takes great relish in the language of wrestling and is right at home with this material. It would have been easy to either take the material too seriously or treat it as a joke. He does neither.
All 50 NPC opponents are memorable and original. Appropriately for the genre, they tend to be more morally ambiguous than most spuervillains. There are a few frighteningly evil people among them, but for the most part you're fighting them because you are fighting them, not because you want to rid the world of them. Some PCs may find themselves looking into something uncomfortably like a mirror when they face some of these opponents. This is all exactly as it should be.
What I Didn't Like: This book is a little scanty on the illustrations. What pictures it has are good, but there are no portraits of the 50 odd NPC antagonists in the back of the book. I can't say I felt cheated, and you know you aren't getting big-name production values when you see the Cryptosnark label, but at least one or two portraits would have been nice.
In Conclusion: I would have gladly paid $25 for this book, and Cryptosnark Games is charging only five. If you haven't stopped reading this review and gone over to buy a copy, do it now.
