Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KDLadage" data-source="post: 2010850" data-attributes="member: 88">The Coming of Shadows is the second-season sourcebook for the Babylon 5 Roleplaying game published by Mongoose. My review of the Roleplaying game can be found on this website as well.One of the real strengths of the core rulebook was the section detailing the first season. When I first got wind that the second season book would be a softcover, rather than a hard-cover like the core book, I was a little disappointed. My own thinking went something akin to either "keep all of the seasonal books hard-cover" or "you should not have included season 1 in the core book, so that in the end I would have a softcover for each season handy..." Alas, I was not consulted. But... lets dive in and look at what we get for our $24.95, shall we?The cover is glossy, which makes the cover photo very nice looking indeed. Three shadows over a planetary background, one with a beam of pure death streaming from it; an Earth (Omega?) ship off to the side. Nice look.The back cover appears to have been printed in error. Much of the information seems to have been lifted from the core book unedited, and does not apply to this volume. Unfortunately, the editing errors do not end here. Most of them are minor and easilly overlooked. Others are rather glaring and I find difficult to understand how they managed to stay in the book...INTRODUCTIONThe introduction is on page 3.  It is a brief and interesting read. It does a decent job of selling the book to those of us reading it. In this chapter we get the information that the book is to be one of several "season guides" (see above for my thoughts on season 1 in the core book).PERSONALITIESPages 4 to 14 cover the personalities of 2259. Here we are introduced to Sheridan (12th level officer; although they mistate the name of the Minbari ship Sheridan destroyed), as well as updated character sheets for Ivonova, Garibaldi, Fraklin, Winters and so on...We get photos of the characters; however Sheridan's is so dark as to be nearly black throughout; G'Kar's I am fairly certain is not G'Kar, Vir's is the same as in the core book, as is Mr. Morden's (but at least he gets stats this time).Mr. Morden includes a class I cannot find anywhere. At first I thought his 6th Level Shadow Agent was simply telling me he was a 6th level Agent, in the employ of the shadows. This does not appear to be the case, as the numbers simply do not add up.This chapter closes with some sample NPC type characters. A nice closer for this chapter, in my opinion, and something that should have been in the core book.THE GALAXY OF 2259This is the meat of the book, and runs from page 15 to page 125. For the most part, the writing is well done, the information is fairly accurate and the interpretations are about what I expected. However, some things seem odd here -- mostly from an editing perspective.-- many, many photos in this section are so dark as to be almost black squares with little or no details. Examples: pages 15, 17, 23, 24!, 25!, 38!, 43, 46, 48, 62, 68, 74!, 78, 79!, 88, 89, 91!, 119, and so on. I am sure I missed a few. Those with "!" next to them are particularly bad.-- From pages 15 to 66, all episodes are given the correct year of 2259; after this page, all (and I do mean all) episoides are given the incorrect year of 2258...-- Some minor errors seem to have cropped in... much like the Darkstar/Blackstar name change in Sheridan's character write-up in the previous chapter. These errors are small and simple to ignore. Honestly, I espect a few things like this to crop up given the scope of the show.-- Spellings... There exists a few odd spellings, not ones I am familiar with, or not used to. Clark vs. Clarke, Hague vs. Haig for example. Not a major deal, just not the way I expected them to be spelled.-- The sections detailing the advancement of the Narn-Centauri war (The War of Retribution) were well done and well placed. Nicely written and good information for a long-running campaign.Overall, I would say a good job here.RULES ADDITIONSCritically Injured characters is a good set of rules I may use at some point (although most likely sparingly) <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Memory Vaulting is an interesting read.The Pretige Class GROPOS HOVERPILOT is, well, ok I suppose. Seemed a bit NPCish, but that is ok. Every now and again, you need a good NPC Prestige CLass.The Prestige Class EARTHFORCE INTELLIGENCE AGENT seemd to fill a nitch I am not sure needed filling. I thought this was covered by the AGENT class...The Prestige Class CENTAURUM ROYAL GUARD was well put together.The two templates (EMPATH and IMPERIAL TELEPATH) were interesting if not all that useful. They do, however, illustrate the limitations of the psionics system in the game as presented.The New Telepathic Feat was good (COMMANDING PRESENCE).The book closes with some equipment (fair) and space vehicles (below average). I say below average, as I am still one that feels that the space combat system, as presented, is less than playable. But that could be me.CONCLUSIONSSo, how to rate the book? I give it a 4. It is a good book overall, that makes the most of a system that has some real flaws. But, seeing as how Mongoose is doing a companion volume, perhaps all is not lost. Perhaps the material is to be elevated as a whole. I can only hope.[b[]edit:[/b] No companion volume; and the system has gotten worse over time... I have revised teh rating.</blockquote>

Verification