Minigame Magazine is published monthly by Valent Games as a PDF. It is 52 pages long, with black-and-white interior art. While the copy I received had no PDF bookmarks added, I was assured that this was only because it was an advance copy, and that the final versions have bookmarks added (likewise, I was told some additional minor editing would be done on the version I received before it went to sale). The file is downloadable from RPGnow.com for $6, being zipped so as to be just over 1 Meg (1.10 megabytes total). All the mechanics are made for 3.5 edition d20 play.
The theme for the first issue of Minigame Magazine is “The Other Side”. Specifically, its all about playing a goblinoid campaign. Covered under that banner are goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, kobolds, lizardfolk, troglodytes, ogres, gnolls, and of course, orcs. Just to be clear, “goblinoid campaign” does not mean that you have a full-blooded orc or two in your otherwise demihuman party; it means that the entire party is goblinoids, and that you’re quite content to remain in the confines of goblinoid civilization (such as it is). No good-aligned bugbears here!
The first section, “Racial Profiling” gives you everything that was missing from Savage Species (Wizards of the Coast); non-mechanical information on what its like to play as one of these races. Each race starts off with several paragraphs describing their society. Following this is a slightly shorter section on domestic issues, and then a brief section on why a member of this race would go adventuring. It seems slightly odd that the Adventuring section was given a comparatively smaller amount of attention, but in reality this section is more about why a goblinoid would want to leave their native tribe/lands, which tends to amount to the fact that they hate their lives their and wanted to try for something better, or were too weak and were exiled. This isn’t the case for all the races covered here, but it’s still something of a commonality. The last section of each racial bio is probably the most interesting; Interracial Relations. This talks about how members of each race deal with every other race covered here, along with an entry for how they deal with “demihumans”, which apparently is how goblinoids think of every standard race in the PHB.
Altogether, the flavor text section on the races totals up to sixteen pages. Not bad so far.
The next section deals with game mechanics for goblinoids. About the first three pages of this section are given over to reprinting the player-character information for these races that is given in the SRD. While some may find this needlessly repetitive, and a waste of otherwise good space, the authors maintain that its probably for the best to reprint it all here so as to have it handy. Personally, I see both sides here; on the one hand, having to flip through multiple books for information on the same subject is very annoying (not to mention it gets heavy carting all those books back and forth). On the other hand, racial information used for player-characters tends to only really be referenced during character creation, so one wonders if it was really so necessary to have it all again here. Given that it’s just barely over 5% of the total content of the issue, I don’t think that there’s any real loss here by playing it safe and having it all reprinted.
Following that, brief coverage is given to skills; more specifically, new uses for old skills. Only Craft and Diplomacy are covered here, but this was one of the parts of the issue I liked the most. The new use for Craft is as Craft (poison). Reading this section over, I was surprised to find that, looking back through Core Rulebooks I-III, there wasn’t any coverage given to how to create poisons. Although I hadn’t missed it before now, I’d be willing to bet that DMs running a campaign where the PCs are less than completely honorable has probably hit this stumbling block before. The Craft (poison) skill listed here is a godsend in that regard, giving creation DCs, possibility of retries, and even that failing the Craft check too badly may result in the crafter poisoning themselves. There’s even a listing of making two- and three-part poisons, where the victim needs to be affected by all three parts to suffer adverse effects. How cool is that? Likewise, the new use for Diplomacy check is to use it during haggling, with the winner being able to shift the price of an item up or down depending on how much they won the check by.
While I think these new skill uses are great for rounding out what any PCs should be able to do (not just goblinoids either), some DMs may want to be wary of allowing them. PCs with high ranks in Craft (poison) will be able to almost effortlessly whip up any poison they want with relative ease, which can make fighting enemies substantially easier when you’re dealing them ability damage. Likewise, PCs with high skill bonuses on Diplomacy will quite likely start using them every time they purchase something, with the greater and greater wins being used to claim item discounts of staggering proportions.
After the skills is a section of new feats. Unlike most d20 products, this one doesn’t try to weigh itself down with feats, having only four new feats listed, along with a notation that Exotic Weapon Proficiency would also be needed for the new weapons detailed below. None of these feats seem particularly unbalancing, and while few, seem rather colorful for use in play (such as my favorite of the bunch, the Runt feat). It’s worth noting that although most of these are thematically more suited for monstrous characters, nothing in their prerequisites states that any other kind of character can’t have them either. I still can’t imagine having a gnome use the Shrewd Bargainer feat to make Intimidate checks when haggling over prices and not grin.
The Exotic Weapons section lives up to its name. Although it only introduces nine new weapons (not counting ammunition for the ranged weapons), they run the gamut from the Tiny blowgun to the Huge siege ram. Each weapon is given a description of its appearance and special combat properties (if any) that would to the weapon entries in the PHB proud. My favorite here is easily the net-launcher, a crossbow-like device that flings (you guessed it) nets at enemies. Between this and things like the gherron (axe with a heavy weight behind the head), manfisher (barbed spear with a rope attached to it), and flinghook (a fish hook-like weapon designed to be thrown and left in the target’s flesh to hamper their movement), this section is great for fleshing out the savageness of goblinoid fighting.
The section on new poisons begins with one that I can guarantee everyone is familiar with: alcohol. That’s right; they actually have an entry for alcohol on the New Poisons Table. Now, when your characters are meeting in the tavern, you’ll know just how much dexterity and wisdom they’re losing after all those mugs of ale. Don’t worry about that evil bartender though; you can use Craft (brewing) to make this instead of Craft (poison). The rest of the poisons here are equally innovative (though perhaps not quite as much fun). Astute readers will notice that a few poisons on the table provided do not have matching descriptions, since they’re self-explanatory (do you really need to be told what cobra venom is?). The ones that are described though are given great detail, such as how zombie powder actually has nothing to do with the undead, it just lowers the target’s will. If this section didn’t have an entry for alcohol, I’d say the best poison in here is the spoiled food entry. Still want those month-old rations from the bottom of your backpack?
The next section details the ubiquitous prestige classes. There are four 5-level PrCs in here, the Gatesmasher, Infiltrator, Ogre-Rider, and Trapmaster. As with most of the other material here, none of these prestige classes absolutely require you to be a goblinoid; only the Ogre-Rider has requirements that are truly hard to meet (since for that one, you must be Small at most, and need a Large Giant-type creature to ride).
The Gatesmasher, as you may expect, features various class abilities designed to make the character able to pound objects into dust. Most of the special abilities used here aren’t applicable in combat, save for the 5th level power, Back to the Wall, which allows the Gatesmasher to not be flanked when within 5 feet of a wall, or wall-like structure. All in all, this is a prestige class that is very innovative for when the DM wants to have a goblin horde attacking a walled community, but you’re unlikely to see a PC take levels in this class (unless they really like to sunder their opponent’s weapons).
The Infiltrator is a prestige class that seems, at least at first glance, rather odd to consider for goblinoids. The flavor text says that this PrC is useful for finding out when the demihumans are planning on raiding your lair. I’m still having some trouble getting this idea to fit with my view on goblinoid activity. I rather see this PrC as being used more when goblinoids want to find out about someplace before they rush out to destroy it. While that’s nothing that a tribe of ogres would do, it seems logical enough for a kobold tribe that is actually going on an offensive raid. Another reason this class makes me think of kobolds is that they have a tendency of producing sorcerers and being closer to magic, and this prestige class grants a few spell-like abilities (for alter self and disguise self, specifically), as well as a supernatural power at 5th level, to maintain a false identity.
The Ogre-Rider is easily my favorite prestige class in here. It’s centered around the idea that a Small goblinoid spellcaster will ride an Ogre (or some other Large Giant-type monster) into battle as a mount, casting spells while it wreaks havoc. Most of the class features of this PrC grant abilities and bonuses that would not look out of place on a paladin’s special mount, or a wizard’s familiar. While the Infiltrator may be the easiest PrC for a group of PCs to use, if you have a party with a goblin spellcaster and an ogre, this PrC easily offers the most in-game fun for players to use.
The Trapmaster is, as you undoubtedly guessed, a prestige class based around designing traps. This PrC is rather straight-forward, granting the Trap Sense and Trapfinding abilities of a rogue, along with a few bonuses to things like adding poison, trap construction, and DCs for others to detect traps. It’s 5th level power is that it can cast the fire trap spell as a spell-like ability once a day. While this prestige-class is solid in design, it seems to lack somewhat in flavor, especially compared to the colorful Ogre-Rider that precedes it. This PrC will probably not be taken by most PCs, since they’re, almost by nature, more proactive, being the ones to venture down into dark tunnels and dungeons and search for traps, instead of setting them and waiting for foes to come along and blunder into them. For DMs a character with levels in this PrC probably won’t get much “on-screen” time; his presence only being known because of the traps that the PCs come across.
The last part of this section focuses on standard classes as used by goblinoids. However, this section quickly relegates itself to only talking about goblinoids and paladins. People expecting some of the same great “fluff” text that they saw at the beginning of this issue are going to be disappointed. This section basically only outlines how the paladin class can be converted for use by evil characters, which basically tells us to reverse most of the abilities it grants. Nothing we haven’t seen before (can we say “anti-paladin”?). Honestly, I’d have been more appreciative as to talking about what it would be like for a goblinoid to become a standard (PHB) paladin, what sort of persecution they were likely to face from their people, what sort of alternate special mount they’d get, etc.
The “crunch” section closes out with five sample NPCs. Some, but not all, of these showcase the new prestige classes we saw before. The five NPCs we see here are a lizardfolk druid, a kobold rogue/trapmaster, a goblin wizard/ogre-rider, an ogre barbarian, and a troglodyte ranger. Most of these NPCs feature short biographies about their lives up until now. DMs will easily be able to use these characters for party encounters of almost any level. One minor flaw I noted here was that none of these entries have the CR listings for these NPCs, which is only a minor flaw at most (just take the monster’s standard CR rating and add the class levels), but is still annoying not to be able to see how challenging these NPCs are at a glance. Hopefully the version on sale at RPGnow will have these added in.
Altogether, the “crunchy” section totals up to twenty pages, barely more than the fluff section. It’s rather refreshing to find a product that isn’t tripping over itself to give you new rules galore at the expense of providing material for how to use it in your campaign.
The next sub-section of this issue is six pages of adventure seeds. Five possible adventure hooks are given first, roughly one to a page. All of these do assume your party is composed of goblinoids who are living among their people (or at the very least, not among demihumans). Rather than the start of grandiose adventures, these are welcomingly small-scale, such as the hook that you need to gather spell components for the tribe’s shaman, and meet antagonists along the way, or that after you killed a group of pillaging do-gooders, you take their sword, which turns out to be intelligent and won’t stop blathering that it wants you to go on a quest. Good stuff here. The last page contains sixteen one-paragraph possible ideas for adventures.
The final six pages of the magazine (the sole page with the OGL on it notwithstanding) contain advice for the DM (though they call it GM just to be safe). This section is probably the most interesting, as it fleshes out what’s only been hinted at all along about how this sort of campaign would work. The players are playing gnolls, hobgoblins, and troglodytes, and you’ve made it clear that they won’t be a bunch of wussy reformed goblinoids who’ve “seen the light” and become good-aligned. Hence, you’ll have players with characters who are neutral at best, and quite likely evil. The bulk of this section is devoted to what it means to play as evil goblinoids in the campaign.
Following that is a section on playing a mixed party. Mixed here is meaning of several different goblinoid subtypes. How does a goblin PC get along with the bugbear in the party when bugbears usually use goblins as ottomans at home? The answer provided here is that survival is what brings different goblinoids together, which is true, but I would have liked to see more about how this is used when playing goblinoid characters who remain part of their own societies. Presumably, they aren’t always fighting for survival, right? What then? There is also a section on goblinoids adventuring with demihumans…but this section only goes on long enough to say that this is a bad idea, short of the goblinoid having been raised by demihumans or is in (or from) a more tolerant culture.
A short (less than a page) section is devoted to why goblinoids would hoard treasure. After all, its not like they can waltz into town and spend it. To them, being more focused on survival and conflict than demihumans, gold and coins don’t have the abstract wealth values assigned to them. Rather, they keep gold because they know its valuable to others, and because sometimes higher powers (gods and their clerics) desire them. This section was somewhat enlightening, as I hadn’t considered that goblinoids would have intrinsically less use for monetary value, though upon thinking about it, that makes sense.
The last section is devoted to the battle tactics of each race. These short sections, totaling two pages, give a paragraph or two about how each race approaches combat. Nothing too fancy here, just reiterating what most of us probably already know. Ogres like to wade into combat and bludgeon things to death, kobolds avoid combat unless they have overwhelming odds, etc. Still, this will probably be useful for a DM who really does run a goblinoid campaign, since combat will be prevalent, and differentiating the fighting methods of each goblinoid race helps to make them distinct.
One topic that wasn’t covered is one that will probably be keenly felt later in the campaign: goblinoids at higher levels. What happens then? How does goblinoid society react when they suddenly have a cleric who can outdo all of the tribe’s shamans? How do the goblins feel when a 15th level goblin fighter in their tribe can trounce a troop of ogres without breaking a sweat? It seems likely that these PCs, being quite likely evil, would take over their tribes, perhaps uniting their race, if not all goblinoids. What then? How does the DM deal with having a party that is suddenly massing hordes of goblinoids for a genocidal war against the demihumans? There is a lot about high level play in this type of campaign that could use answering, and the lack of note here will make it harder for DMs who do run such a campaign that far.
All in all, however, what’s not included is eclipsed by what is. The material, both fluff and crunch, is very useful and interesting, along with the plus of being easy to port over even if you aren’t running a goblinoid campaign (though that’s definitely where you’ll get the most bang for your buck). The rules well-understood by the writers, with barely an error in the entirety of the issue. Weighing in at over fifty pages, this is definitely worth six dollars it costs. If you’re playing a campaign that’s going to be at least moderately goblinoid-heavy, whether playing as them, or against them, issue number one of Minigame magazine is worth picking up.
