Modern Arms Guide

[Messageboard Golem]

Now you can wield the most powerful weapons of the modern age using the classic d20 rules. Equip your agent team with the latest and greatest weapons, armor, and gear from all over the world – all in one volume. Detailed descriptions for most weapons and gear are included, along with rules for each.

Firearms and Tactical Weapons for the D20 System! Hundreds of guns, rocket launchers, and other tools of destruction, with complete rules for using them in any D20 game setting.
Melee and Exotic Weapons for the D20 System! All the latest hand-held, thrown, and martial arts weapons fully described and mechanically supported, and more.
Accessories for the D20 System! Silencers, laser scopes, gyro-stabilizers… The most cutting-edge advances in weapons technology, ready for your characters and their enemies to field.
Protective Gear for the D20 System! Everything with stopping or protective power, plus new rules for using armor in the Spycraft game.
Many Other Items! Everything from black market rarities to computer software to surveillance gear. All your spying and paramilitary needs in one place.
Expanded Combat Rules! Modifiers and conditions to increase the action in your campaign. Set the level of detail you want to use!

 

[Psion]

Spycraft Modern Arms Guide

The Spycraft Modern Arms Guide is a species of supplement that I haven't seen in a while: a supplement focused almost exclusively on weapons. The modern arms guide provides new weapons - firearms and otherwise - for the game. But it also provides new qualities for weapons as well as variant rules for combat.

A First Look

The Spycraft Modern Arms Guide is a 144 page book priced at $24.95.

The cover of the book is a silver-grey with a black line-art drawing of a firing an automatic rifle. The style and interior layout is similar to the Spycraft book itself, though black ink is used vice silver ink used for header text and borders.

The interior is black and white. Overall the art is good, with action scenes as well as illustrations of weapons. Some of the interior art is a bit cartoonish for my tastes. The interior text is dense but clear and readable.

A Deeper Look

The Spycraft Modern Arms Guide has two major sections. The first chapter outlines new rules, much of which lays the groundwork for the later chapters. The remaining chapters are devoted to new equipment (primarily weapons) for the Spycraft game.

In keeping with the book's heavy emphasis on weapons, the rules chapter includes a new prestige class, the triggerman. The triggerman is based off of the dual-pistol wielding archetype of Hong Kong cinema.

The rest of the chapter is combat and equipment rules. New combat variants are presented, the most significant of which is the fluid initiative rules. The fluid initiative rules allow a character's initiative total to change during combat. Factors that hinder a character's progress (such as taking wounds or failing a save against an explosion) lowers the character's initiative total, while certain maneuvers can raise a character's total. A character with a very high total can attempt to perform additional actions, while character's with a low total may be temporarily stymied from acting.

The chapter introduced new qualities that can be assigned to weapons. For example, ammunition can have an armor piercing quality that reduces the effects of armor, or a weapon may have a double safe quality that makes it less likely the weapon will accidentally fire. Weapon statistics later in the book may include these qualities as points of contrast, and new masterwork weapon rules in this chapter allow a gunsmith to add certain qualities to weapons.

Other new rules include rules for gear damage, weapon concealment, black market weapons purchasing, blast damage, and morale rules.

The remaining chapters provide description of gear from real world sources. The chapters include melee weapons, hurled weapons, exotic weapons, firearms, accessories, tactical weapons, and protective gear. The bulk of the chapters are equipment descriptions, but a few new rules are included as well. Among these are the recoil rules in the firearms chapter.

The optional recoil rule assigns a recoil rating to all firearms. Recoil has no game effects when making normal attacks, but attacks that involve multiple shots for a weapon (such as autofire attacks) suffer a penalty if the recoil rating is higher than the user's strength. This rule could be a good one to help return the importance to the strength statistic in d20 system games that have an emphasis on modern or ultra-modern weapons.

Conclusion

There are certain people who will find this sort of supplement useless; you know who you are. On the other hand, if you are the sort of person with a keen interest in military hardware, and get a thrill out of seeing your character enjoy the advantages of a precision smithed weapon, this book will obviously be of keen interest to you.

The initiative, morale, and weapon quality rules are all good additions to the d20 system, and could easily be added to other modern or ultra-modern games.

-Alan D. Kohler

 

[Messageboard Golem]

By Steve Creech, Exec. Chairman, d20 Magazine Rack

This review is for Spycraft: Modern Arms Guide from Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG). This 144-page perfect bound Spycraft supplement retails for $24.95. The book is the first in a continuing series of support supplements specifically for the Spycraft setting.

Chapter one jumps right in with new rules for Spycraft. New skills, a prestige class, combat options and new gear make up the chapter. New skills include: Craft (gunsmithing), Craft (weaponsmithing), and Knowledge (firearms). The Triggerman is a prestige class drawn straight from Hong Kong action movies. His trademark style, a pistol in each hand and a non-stop spray of bullets coupled with martial arts. This is one very cool prestige class. The combat rules offer new initiative rules (making it more realistic but complex), combat actions, morale rules, and updated rules of existing Spycraft options.

Chapter two is devoted to melee weapons (standard and improvised). Here you find descriptions and statistics for many weapons including: acetylene torch, sword cane, nightstick, scythe and tire iron. Improvised weapons consist of such things as a staple gun, power drill, mace or taser.

Chapter three focuses on hurled weapons. Finally, someone has addressed compound bows in a gaming supplement. Different types of grenades are also detailed such as chemical, incendiary, fragmentation, and white phosphorus. Other hurled weapons include: ball bearings, Molotov cocktail, nail gun (my favorite), rock and shotput.

Exotic weapons are the subject of chapter four. Martial arts enthusiasts will enjoy this chapter. Here you will find polearms, harpoon gun, butterfly sword, half-staff sword, nine ring broadsword, rope weapons, tonfa, and whip chain, just to scratch the surface. The variety of this chapter will really help flavor your campaigns.

Chapter five is all about firearms, period. This is probably the most comprehensive collection of firearms rules and equipment to date in a publication. There are even optional rules to factor in recoil in order to add realism. Handguns are broken dwon into pistols and revolvers with each gun being listed according to manufacturer, model, caliber, ammunition capacity, length, and weight. Rifles see the same format only are broken into assault, bolt-action and sniper categories. Shotguns also see three sub-categories: break action, combat (semi- and fully automatic), and pump action. Submachine guns have a single category only. Here you find the likes of the Colt 635, Heckler & Koch family of MP5’s, or even the Israeli IMI Uzi.

Ammunition is also given a comprehensive treatment. In addition to the seven bullet types covered in the main Spycraft book, rules covering blanks, Blitz-Action Trauma (BAT), boat tail, compacted powder, discarding sabot, dum-dum, hollow point, hydrashock, nozzler, steel core, talon and wad cutter are added. Personally, I like the acknowledgement that different kinds of bullets will do different levels of damage. (I’m a firm believer in Hydra-Shoks and Golden Sabers, which are very similar to Black Talons, for defensive rounds.)

No modern arms guide would be complete without a chapter on equipment and accessories. Just about everything you could need or use to outfit your weapon is listed here. From slings to bipods, to flash suppressors to scopes; it’s all here. Someone really did his homework on this chapter.

Chapter seven discusses tactical (military) weapons. Explosives such as claymores, fragmentation mines, cherry bobmbs, and toe poppers are covered fairly efficiently. Flamethrowers, grenade launchers, machine guns (such as the M60), mortars and rocket launchers also are detailed (as is the ammunition used for them).

The final chapter is devoted to protective gear. After all, with everything that has been presented in the pages beforehand, a character is going to need all the help he can get. All three types of armor are covered along with safety gear like bomb blankets, combat boots, and gloves.

Overall, Modern Arms Guide is an excellent resource for any modern setting RPG and not just for Spycraft. It is quite comprehensive in its treatment of weapons (especially firearms) and is a good addition to GM’s resource library. This is one book that will see a lot of use in the coming months. Especially once d20 Modern is out.

To see the graded evaluation of this product, go to The Critic's Corner at www.d20zines.com.

 

[dpmcalister]

This Modus Operandi review originally appeared here.

Design
Unlike the previous releases for Spycraft, the Modern Arms Guide is a soft-bound book totalling 144 pages. The cover, in keeping with the previous releases, is silver with a monotone drawing depicting a man firing a submachine gun and is printed on stiff card. The interior is printed on heavier, non-glossy paper than the previous releases and the silver ink is replaced by black for the headings and border and by grey for the page edges and chapter lead pages. Included throughout the book are various pieces of black and white art, the majority of which are line-art drawings of selected weapons. Overall, the presentation and layout is of a very high standard and the replacement of the extremely reflective silver ink is a definite positive point.

Content
As would be expected from something calling itself a "Modern Arms Guide" this supplement contains a heavy bias towards weapons. The supplement is divided into eight chapters: New Rules, Melee Weapons, Hurled Weapons, Exotic Weapons, Firearms, Accessories, Tactical Weapons, and Protective Gear.

Chief among the rules additions is the inclusion of a new prestige class, The Triggerman, based on the archetypal pistol-in-each-hand combatants made popular by the likes of John Woo. This prestige class is balanced and well thought-out, adding to the cinematic feel of the main rules. Following on from this are three advanced combat options: fluid initiative, new movement actions and morale. The most adventurous of these is the fluid initiative. The Spycraft writers have attempted, successfully it must be said, to inject some realism into the initiative rules. At the very modest cost of slightly increased complexity, initiative can now change during combat – from round to round. Taking damage, or even firing a weapon with which the character is not proficient, lower the appropriate initiative, while aiming or being on higher ground improve the appropriate initiative. Although these additions are marked as "of greatest interest to experienced Game Controls, and should be considered optional" they have been written in such a straightforward manner that they can be incorporated with ease into any session. Likewise, the new movement actions and morale rules add an element of realism to the proceedings.

Also introduced are various qualities that can be incorporated into weapons and gear. Examples of such are armour piercing (which enables the weapon to ignore 3 points of damage reduction), and suppressed (which makes it more difficult to hear the weapon being fired). Many of the weapons detailed later in the supplement have at least one of these qualities but rules are also presented for characters to incorporate these qualities themselves thereby creating masterwork items.

The remaining new rules are weapon and gear concealment, new weapon malfunctions, damaging (and repairing) gear, and the black market. Perhaps the most useful of these are the concealment and black market rules. The concealment rules are extremely useful, given that the characters are secret agents, whereas the black market rules add an alternative method of procuring gear while "in the field".

The remainder of the supplement, some 114 pages, detail real world weapons and gear. The majority of these pages are descriptions of the weapons or gear and game statistics, although there are optional recoil rules and amplifications on the use of the Improvised Weapon feat.

The recoil rules are, again, very simple, but very effective. Although having no effect on standard attacks, recoil comes into effect during autofire, burst, and strafe attacks. Each firearm has a recoil rating and if this is higher than the character’s Strength then penalties to hit are accrued based on the difference between the two numbers. That is, if the weapons recoil rating is 14 and the character’s Strength is 12, the character accrues a –2 penalty to all autofire, burst, and strafe attacks.

As a side-note, the supplement was originally to be called the "Modern Arms and Equipment Guide" (and is still called such in parts of the supplement itself) and a ninth chapter, "Other Gear" was intended for inclusion. Unfortunately, space requirements necessitated the removal of this chapter. However the Spycraft team have made it available as a free download from the official website.

Overall
A very well written and thought out supplement, the Modern Arms Guide will appeal to the majority of Spycraft players. Although there are some that, perhaps, will not be that interested in the detailed weapons, the additional rules and prestige class provide something for everyone. Indeed, with little work, the initiative rules could be used in any d20 game.