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The best fantasy rules-lite system until now. I've started playing QUERP Modern and I've bought QUERP 2 just for curiosity but, after having read it, I've forgot all my attempts to resurrect old system as Basic D&D and similar retro-clone. I'm satisfied: great idea the Character Types, very useful to start in few minutes any fantasy adventure.
Highly recommended for beginners or simoly for masters and players tired of tons of pages of rules.
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A useful and great addition to QUERP Modern.
In the past I've played to other indie and rules-light systems (BASH!, SUPER!, Icons) but QUERP MOdern - Heroes is faster, simplier and direct. It offers good and detailed Character Types off most models of superheroes, from Paragon (Superman?) to Vigilante (The Punisher?) to Gadgetteer (Batman?) to Elemental (Iceman?), Tank (The Thing?) and so on. Great also the rule on Fate Points (like as the old Karma Points of Marvel Superheroes) and the list of powers is sufficient for setup a good campaign.
Highly recommended for the fans pf QUERP but also for who want to start a superheroic campaign in few minutes without giving up to simplicity and fun.
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Absolutely great universal and rules-light system. It deserve all the possible success.
It's highly customizable thanks to the simple system of the Weapons Table and the Character Types give the possibility to start a modern campaing in few minutes.
The rules on the vehicles are very simple but effective.
QUERP is addictive.
Highly advised ;)
(sorry for my bad english)
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Rather colourful, quite a lot of artwork.
Each page has a green circuit board-type frame, which, with the artwork, at 75 pages can use up quite some ink.
The 'universal bullet' rule makes it easier when you have ammunition for 2 or more weapons.
So pistols, SMGs, assault rifles all use the same ammunition, instead of using different calibre ammunition (5.56mm, 7.62mm & 9mm), as in most games using firearms.
Possibly an error on P16: Defence starts at 10 plus armour (+3 flak jacket), total=13.
But P16 states in the example, that Sgt Joe Edwards (defence of 10+3 flak jacket) has a defence of 12?
Altogether, quite a cheap, simplistic RPG.
Not bad for £3.16.
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What I have read I have enjoyed it. I am thinking it will be fun when I get a chance to work into my game.
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Adds a new dimension to the basic game: This set of rules allows you to go on a quest rather than searching for a finale room. It also contains rules for two-player parties.
Again with the spelling errors? (rolleyes) "Alter" refers to a change of some kind. "Altar" refers to the big stone thing priests pray at. Really five seconds at dictionary dot com is all it takes..... (Don't even get me started on the "Chaple" in the Forest Quest Cards)
Overall, you get a good value for the money. Definitely money well-spent.
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For those of us who loved the original fighting fantasy game book, this is a must have purchase, all the great bits that you remember are in here and simply mapped so that it's simple and easy to run. There are a few changes in here to keep your players guessing, but if you loved the ff book, you will love this. A great dungeon crawl with enough variety to keep things interesting
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This game is the very definition of "pick up and play" fantasy role playing. It will appeal to players of games with simple universally adaptable common-sense mechanics (like T&T, Fighting Fantasy-AFF or scaled down rule systems, WHQ). The beauty of systems like these is that it is also very easy to modify the rules to suit a campaign or special setting. Perfect for a Sunday afternoon dungeon crawl.
The layout is slick, professional and easy on the eye.
Ace.
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Like its sibling products in the QUERP line, QUERP MODERN: WILD WEST crams a lot of goodness in a small book. Except for referencing the Q: MODERN main book for a few skills, this volume is largely a stand-alone book. The first thirty or so pages of WILD WEST covers a brief history of the time-period and presents several famous persons of the era statted for the game. The next section covers the character archetypes, skills, and equipment while the last section presents game master information, advice, and a nice starting adventure. I highly recommend this game for anyone wanting a rules-lite, fast-playing Old West rpg!
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This is a very nice little sample of the QUERP game. I've just downloaded the 2nd Ed rulebook, and would like to point out and it appears that there's just enough material here taken from the rules to start role-playing with the QUERP system using the Sample (or at least get a good idea what it's all about). It reminds me greatly of Fighting Fantasy and simpler game book systems which got me into to role-playing (Incidentally, in the full rule book there is a solo game, as well as the adventure contained here in the Sample). Other players may be reminded of the fastplay fun of Heroquest, AHQ and WHQ.
The QUERP Sample lets you play a Warrior and Sage (2 of the 6 six classes), but you may have to improvise around Defence and armour rules which don't appear to be here (but the weapons are!). The presentation of the Sample resembles the actual rulebook - which is professionally laid out, with stylish b/w images, except that the pages in the rule book proper are a gorgeous parchment beige (but you still have the option use a printer-friendly copy which has no parchment backgrounds).
A high quality sample of a good quality product.
A must for the curious player, considering a fun "beer and pretzels" dungeon crawl (as the Americans say).
(The QUERP Sample was free at the time of writing this review.)
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With its new Dungeon Tiles line, Greywood Publishing seeks to enter a fairly crowded market, and Volume 1 makes for a somewhat disappointing initial foray. When a new product comes into a market space that's already filled with choices, the new product needs to offer some genuine added value in order to attract customers. This volume fails to do that. The layouts themselves are rather basic, uninspiring shapes on 5x5 tiles, unadorned except for cracked stone floors and thick black walls. In many ways, they remind me of 5x5 versions of some of SkeletonKey Games's earliest and most basic tile sets. What moves them from "unexciting" to "unusable" is their scale. At 20mm per square, they're noticeably smaller than the vast majority of tile sets, which run 25mm/1 inch per square, perfect for 25mm/28mm miniatures. Greywood's tiles are too small to work comfortably with miniatures on 25mm bases, and too small to connect to tile sets from other publishers. For the reasons cited here, I won't be using Greywood's tile sets at my table, and can't recommend them at yours.
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What a fun addition to the QUERP rules system! While maintaining the rules simplicity that makes QUERP my rpg of choice, HEROES delivers a solid rules set for playing costumed heroes. The mechanics (2d6 + modifiers vs. target difficulty) will be familiar to anyone who has played either QUERP Modern or QUERP Fantasy but they have been tweeked a bit to handle the power levels of a four-color comics game. The system is flexible enough to handle just about any style of super hero gaming from gritty dark knights to god-like paragons. Complements, also, on the choice of art which looks like it came from classic comics and make HEROES one of the nicest looking QUERP books to date.
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I can’t really say why it’s happened, but all of a sudden it seems like sandbox-style adventures are back in vogue. Rather than following along (or rather, being “railroaded” along) a series of pre-determined plot points, the current zeitgeist of good adventure design seems to be that PCs should be given some minimal plot structure which grants them a large amount of freedom to wander around a map of a given area, exploring and basically making their own way through an adventure.
As with so many things that are suddenly popular, it’s not too hard to find examples where someone was already there, doing it before it became big. Case in point, Fighting Fantasy – Forest of Doom, by Greywood Publishing.
I never had the pleasure of reading the original Fighting Fantasy novels, so I can’t say how well this adventure holds up compared to them. However, what I did find interesting was the cover’s assertion that this is an adventure for a single character of 3rd-level, or a party of 1st-level characters. Solo adventures have always been much too rare.
From a technical standpoint, the book does a pretty good job for itself. The entire book is searchable, allowing for easy copy-and-paste, and there are full bookmarks throughout. One minor thing here was that the bookmarks aren’t nested – so the bookmark to a heading has the bookmarks for all of its sub-headings appearing right under it; it could have been done better.
Notwithstanding the covers, and one initial two-page map (actually the same map, presented with numbers and again without), there’s no color artwork here. The black and white art is fairly plentiful, however, and looks pretty good. Certainly, there’s room for improvement (quite a bit of it seemed like suspiciously clean pencil drawings), but nothing that was cringe-worthy.
My big problem with the book’s presentation is that the maps don’t have anything save for a loose scale between various numbered locations. Having only recently discovered the whole idea of hex-crawling (that is, exploring the individual hexes on an overland map), it seems like a great idea that wasn’t implemented here. Certainly, there’s no reason why the DM can’t deal with a looser interpretation of the distance between places, and relative travel times, but it seems like it could have been done more neatly.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Forest of doom is a sandbox “dungeon” set in the eponymous forest. The initial adventure setup can basically be summarized that a local dwarven kingdom has lost the magic item that’s a national symbol of pride and strength, and they want someone to go get it back for them – there’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the gist of it. Hence, the player is basically wandering throughout the forest, looking for clues and dealing with whatever situations he stumbles upon until he can find it.
The individual encounters are listed corresponding to the numbers on the DM’s map. Most are singular encounters, though some are detailed to the point of having a tactical map (with the one-inch squares) included. Likewise, most of these are self-contained, but some refer to each other and/or the overarching meta-plot of the adventure. It’s the essence of a sandbox game, though I personally would have included something along the lines of a random encounter table (given how much wandering through that forest the player-character is going to do), or at least a listing of what the major NPCs will do subsequent to meeting/fighting the PC (if they survive).
It should be noted that, before the adventure begins, there’s a section on a new ability score, called Luck. This seventh ability score, meant for PCs only, basically functions similarly to action points; characters can make a luck check to grant themselves bonuses, reduce damage, and several other things. Of course, every time you use a luck ability, successful or not, your luck score goes down by 1, a la temporary ability damage. It’s really quite simple for how it’s presented, and functions just as well as the more popular action point alternative.
The book is rounded out with three appendices. The first covers a menagerie of new monsters. Most of them seem fairly mundane, but interestingly several of these creatures seem to be re-imaginings of existing fantasy archetypes, such as the “titan cavetroll” compared to a normal troll. The second appendix covers new magic items and a new spell (though disappointingly, a spell to boost Luck, mentioned in the initial Luck section, isn’t to be found here), before finally concluding with a third appendix covering scaling the adventure, using it for a lower-level party instead of a single higher-level character, and a series of example PCs for use.
At fort-five pages long, Forest of Doom is a fairly good adventure for introducing low-level characters to sandbox adventuring (or indeed, to introduce them to adventuring altogether). While there were certainly things that I’d have introduced or done differently (primarily to make it easier to explore the huge forest, and adding random encounters instead of waiting for them to stumble across static ones), this is still very good in what it offers. The basic premise is sound, the three dozen or so encounters are interesting and varied, and the Luck mechanics help to cushion the PC from bad luck or wrong decisions being fatal. Conquering the Forest of Doom is a great way for a character to start a heroes’ journey.
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Please note that this is an updated review based on the current updated version of "Hammerax - The Ancient World" with an improved layout. This layout change was made to resolve a title font legibility concern I had raised in my original review which is no longer available since it no longer reflects the currently available version of this product. It is also worth mentioning that any publisher who is this responsive to customer feedback is sure to keep me as a loyal customer.
Now onto the review...
"Hammerax - The Ancient World" is another excellent product from the folks at Greywood Publishing. This is a complete roleplaying game powered by Greywood's excellent QUERP game engine paired with a classic fantasy world setting that covers all of the bases for a long campaign. At around 175 pages it is almost three times the size of the original QUERP rulebook and those extra pages are filled with lots of fantasy goodness. After a generic introductory chapter we are thrust into a lengthy chapter on the history of the Ancient World followed by an enjoyable gazetteer of the lands of "Hammerax - the Ancient World" as seen through the eyes of a professional explorer named Jarn the Wanderer (who reminds me of Volo). Now, my favourite part of reading any fantasy RPG are the pages dedicated to the various kingdoms & lands that make up the fantasy setting, and "Hammerax - The Ancient World" does a nice job of giving flavour to each land without being too detailed as to limit the imagination of the gamemaster who plans to run adventures in these lands. However, I was a bit disappointed to find that no world map was provided so I really can't visualize where all these wonderful lands are "supposed" to be in relation to each other although that can be seen as an opportunity to fit things in where you need them. Hopefully a Hammerax world map is forthcoming for those who really need to know where everything "officially" belongs. One kingdom named Aralor does get more detailed treatment (and a map) as the main campaign area to get the dice rolling as it were. The kingdom of Aralor looks to be a thinly veiled Arthurian Camelot/Albion type of place so anyone with even the most basic knowledge of Arthurian lore will feel right at home. All of the things I have mentioned thus far gets us through the first third of the book.
The next third of the book presents a decidedly "Hammerax" flavour of the QUERP roleplaying rules including some character types (classes) tailored to adventuring in the kingdom of Aralor. The QUERP rules are quick, flexible, and easy to learn without being incomplete so no complaints here. These Aralorian(?) character types seem to be evenly matched with the existing QUERP character types so mixing & matching will not be a problem for those who want to play their favourites from the original QUERP rulebook or the very useful QUERP Player's Companion.
The final third of the book covers monsters, magic items, and 2-part adventure to kickstart a campaign in the kingdom of Aralor. Once again the monsters are on par with existing QUERP critters from the QUERP rulebook and the QUERP Bestiary (another great product) so all is good. It is also worth mentioning that I found the starter adventure to be a good read and it's theme fits in very well with the "Arthurian feel" of the land of Aralor so its inclusion was a welcome choice to close out this product.
Once again the folks at Greywood Publishing have cranked out some great content for a nice price so I have to rate "Hammerax - The Ancient World" a solid 5 out of 5.
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This product continues the good work done by Greywood with a solid approach to giving usful advice to GMs (for any system really). I beleive it is mainly aimed at newer players (though it is worth the read even for us older players) and it does a good job of providing a useful information in a practical and easily understood manner.
One thing that I particulary liked was the generator for communities which is I beleive is usful for GM.
Added to this there is a complete collection of spells, a selection of new magic items and another adventure (bonus!!) along with some tables for character traits and advice on handing out XP.
Throw in a handful (9) of new monsters and you have a well rounded product which is usful to the full range of gamers.
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