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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2009272" data-attributes="member: 172">Spycraft Modern Arms GuideThe 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 LookThe 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 LookThe 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.ConclusionThere 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</blockquote>

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