Products That Overwhelmed You

[hawkeyefan]

Impossible Landscapes is a book I revently grabbed. It’s a Delta Green campaign and it’s about the King in Yellow/Carcosa, and I love that stuff, so I picked it up to see if it’d be fun to run in one system or another.

For some reason, I can’t get into it. There’s just so...much...backstory....with so many NPCs who the PCs won’t even meet.

I may revisit it at some point, but it was too much and my head kept bouncing off of it.

 

[innerdude]

The entire White Wolf product line. Invariably, when I peruse any given book from any given product line (Mage, Vampire, Werewolf, Scion), I read the first 2 or 3 pages and my eyes glaze over.

White Wolf has seemingly perfected the anti-innerdude formula. Not even GURPS made me bounce that hard off of it.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

For some reason, Hero System is something I struggled with.

I don't know why. It does a lot of similar things to how GURPS (a game which seems very intuitive to me) works, but something about how the books I tried to pick up explained things didn't click for me. Offhand, I do not know which edition of the game it was that I was trying to play at the time. It was whatever would have been available at the local game store around the middle of D&D 4E's life cycle.

I think HERO system's biggest problem is their presentation. They really keep kicking own goals when it comes to putting out new products. Instead of putting good art and pre-building things up front where they can catch the eye and the imagination they front load the books (literally) with indecipherable HERO jargon. It's no wonder the game attracts so few new players. As someone who would love to have more people to play HERO with, that bugs me.

 

[amethal]

Dungeon Crawl Classics #51 Castle Whiterock.
I got this 700+ page, color-coded multi-book boxed monstrosity ages ago at GenCon dirt cheap in an auction lot.
I've browsed through it a bit a few times but never even tried to run it. I just don't feel like reading 700+ pages of stuff...

With Castle Whiterock you could, if you wanted, just run the "Red Book" - levels 1 to 6A - and ignore almost all of the rest. Any references to things on lower levels could just be viewed as referring to "somewhere in the Underdark, outside the scope of this adventure".

However, it's the "almost" that gets complicated.

Keeping this vague (to avoid spoilers) but to run level 1 you will also need to know about a specific shop (location C-16 in chapter 2 of the Gazetteer), the descriptions of the second (and ideally also the first) of the patrons of the Slumbering Drake Inn whose names begin with "A" (Appendix 1 of the Black Book), a new alchemical item (Appendix 4) and a new feat (Appendix 2).

It's also very helpful to look at Player Handout E before running it (in the Handouts) and locate on it where area 1-1 must be. (But I don't think it does a very good job of depicting where area 1-14 is.)

(It doesn't help that the level 1 map is missing a couple of doors and the location of area 1-7, and the introduction says that area 1-1 doesn't have a roof but the description that area doesn't make any sense unless it does have one.)

 

[ccs]

With Castle Whiterock you could, if you wanted, just run the "Red Book" - levels 1 to 6A - and ignore almost all of the rest. Any references to things on lower levels could just be viewed as referring to "somewhere in the Underdark, outside the scope of this adventure".

However, it's the "almost" that gets complicated.

Keeping this vague (to avoid spoilers) but to run level 1 you will also need to know about a specific shop (location C-16 in chapter 2 of the Gazetteer), the descriptions of the second (and ideally also the first) of the patrons of the Slumbering Drake Inn whose names begin with "A" (Appendix 1 of the Black Book), a new alchemical item (Appendix 4) and a new feat (Appendix 2).

It's also very helpful to look at Player Handout E before running it (in the Handouts) and locate on it where area 1-1 must be. (But I don't think it does a very good job of depicting where area 1-14 is.)

(It doesn't help that the level 1 map is missing a couple of doors and the location of area 1-7, and the introduction says that area 1-1 doesn't have a roof but the description that area doesn't make any sense unless it does have one.)

I seriously doubt that I'll ever run this thing (I didn't even intentionally buy it - it's left over chaff from an auction lot I bid on for something else).
Like I said, I look at it & just have no motivation to read beyond a few pages....
But thanks for the tip.

 

[Zaukrie]

I played Dangerous Journeys for about 3 years straight. I knew the rules so well that I started homebrewing stuff, like the grappling tables, to make them a bit more interesting and balanced. I'm not sure how I learned the rules - I'm fairly certain I learned through a friend and then just gradually read up on the bits I was interested in when making a character. I was in university and had more time on my hands.

Fast Forward 20-some years.

My son found the books and begged me to run a game for him. He made a Necromancer. I tried to read through the rules to help him. His 5 page character was finished and I needed to run an adventure for him. I couldn't remember all the intricacies of the rules and I just couldn't find the energy to read through the book, much less make NPCs to challenge my son's character. His adventure never happened.

Those books were very cool. For me, I wish there was a D&D game where magic was more like that. But ya, there were A LOT of rules. This, Ptolus and Mage Knight (bought it over the holidays, still in shrink wrap, so does it really count?).

 

[Voadam]

bought it over the holidays, still in shrink wrap, so does it really count?

If you are too overwhelmed to even open it, I think that would count.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Those books were very cool. For me, I wish there was a D&D game where magic was more like that. But ya, there were A LOT of rules. This, Ptolus and Mage Knight (bought it over the holidays, still in shrink wrap, so does it really count?).

The spell system was so amazing. So much variety.

 

[Zaukrie]

The spell system was so amazing. So much variety.

Every caster was different (or so I imagine, we never actually PLAYED these rules, alas). Someone should buy those rules, and clean them up and publish them....

 

[Democratus]

Roll Master proved to be quite a handful.