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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Teflon Billy" data-source="post: 2211201" data-attributes="member: 264">This is Bad Axe’s first setting supplement for their awesome Grim Tales D20 system.Now I loved Grim Tales. Absolutely adored it. When I finished reading it, I realized that I had in my hands the D20 toolkit so many folks had been asking for. It looked awesome for most any genre I could think of (and included examples that ranged from “Dark Medieval Fantasy” to “Post Apocalyptic”). It was, at its core, tools for the Game Master to create what he needed; rather than trying to fit his vision of a campaign into the setting assumptions made by the game’s designer. So if you had asked me if a setting was necessary for Grim Tales, my first  thought would’ve been “no, not really”. No hostility or anything like that (publishers need to publish after all), but like GURPS Fantasy before it, I thought that the published setting would be a nice example of how the system could be used to make a setting, and would have some adventure tossed in as an afterthought (the very name Slavelords of Cydonia itself made my mind hearken back to Slave Pits of the Undercity, fair or not)What I wasn’t expecting was a work of such utility and imagination. I really need to get past my constant surprise at the quality of Bad Axe’s product, seeing as they have never to my knowledge produced a product of less-than-exceptional quality.But where was I? Ah yes; what I was expecting was a vanilla “Dark Fantasy” setting with some example adventures.What I got was a series of connected adventures taking the characters from levels 1 through 20, drawing not only themes presented in the Pulp Adventure novels I grew up with (Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars books spring to mind a lot), but presenting them seamlessly melded with advice for the DM on running this massive, dimension-spanning campaign for characters from any of the settings described in the core book (remember? Post-apocalyptic to Dark Medieval Fantasy?). Quite a feat.Now, that said, the product is far from fully fleshed out. It almost couldn’t be given the scale of adventure we are talking about here. The entire thing is a massive, detailed blueprint that will require a fair whack of work from the Game Master to make into something workable. I don’t know that this is even a flaw, I think it might almost be a necessity. On the scale that this adventure operates, a GM would be sorely pressed to utilize (or remember) every detail without a certain amount of “making it his own” allowed.The first half details the adventure itself and is divided into five “Books” each detailing broad sections of the adventure. The second half is a collection of appendices (A thru G), which detail the campaign setting (Cydonia) by defining and describing the Lethid and Sli’ess (the main combatant races of the adventure), creatures the PC’s may encounter, equipment, and a brilliant, brilliant mass combat system. I would have paid decent money for the Mass Combat system alone.To understand the beauty of the Mass Combat system, we need to, again, hearken back to the Grim Tales core book. EN World’s own Upper Krust contributed a very, very intricate and granular Encounter Level system rewrite that is—in the opinion of your humble reviewer—miles better than the core D&D EL System.Slavelords of Cydonia makes use of this powerful engine in it’s Mass Combat system, allowing a balancing of forces that many previous Mass Combat efforts have failed to achieve. If a “unit” (meaning damn near anything given the utility of Upper Krust’s EL system) can be defined in D&D terms, it can be effectively used in the mass combat system. The maps are nicely done, the index is trop notch (and pretty much a requirement if one is to get any easy use out of this beast) and the adventure itself (my group is nearing the end of it) is as fun as it is unusual.Oh, and the cover art is fantastic, reminding me of old-school Frank Frazetta.I may well update this review when my group is finished the adventure, but for now, it earns a strong 4/5.</blockquote>

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