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| Autres commentaires laissés par cet éditeur: |
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SEAN'S PICK OF THE DAY: More Savage awesomeness, this time in the superheroic realm of play from Plain Brown Wrapper. "An ancient worldwide conspiracy...Twisted Nazis, sinister cultists and a cabal of crazed military officers" are all a part of this seven-part epic.
| Classement: | | [4 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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The designs are cool but the image quality is really poor and pixelated. Not suitable for use in any design application that would see the light of day (or the heart of night).
| Classement: | | [1 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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Very large collection of diagrams and symbols for the occult. Haven't used any in a published product yet - but I expect to soon.
| Classement: | | [4 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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Good stuff- and now more of a bargain.Fleshes out Bedlam City a lot more. Lots of stuff on Bedlam of the Past- from Victorian Era, PULP and the Silver Age (which seems like New York of the 70's). Some creepy stuff for psychics/magic types that picks up a major secret from the Bedlam book and expands it. Great new villians that fit the tone of the place (cruddy and sad or creepy and dangerous) plus a dimension full of dinosaurs!
Like i said- Bargain.
| Classement: | | [4 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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Excellent stuff. I bought this a while ago along with 'Straight Out Of Bedlam' and have to say i'm impressed.This a great Iron Age setting full of character, black humour and unique characters. All credit to the author who managed to make a slot-in-anywhere setting which is very hard to do. (Compare this to other city books, especially Authumn Arbour, to see what i mean). I'm actually using this book in my Champions setting, it's the city just down the road from Millenium City- big contrast!
Good Points: As i said, great characters but add to that a great 'secret history' for the players to uncover, fleshed -out neighbourhoods and a comprihensive look at all the organised crime in the city. More importatly it captures a certain flavour which means most GM's will know how to describe to sights, sounds and tone of the city very quickly.
On top of all that you've got boat loads of scerario ideas to flesh out.
Bad Points: Has a few, apart from the occasional typo's and such. If you've gotten any other products from PBWG then you know how the characters are written- they tend to be twists on traditional roles. So no Jim Gordon to rely on here-unless you put him in yourself. Also some of the characters are repeats from other products (Hammer Of Justice, Doctor Scorch, The Nowhere Men) which is kind of annoying- although they do fit the setting like a glove.
Overall- Get it and i'd also recomend Straight Out Of Bedlam as well for more badguys (not repeated), adventures, NPC'S secret history stuff and Horrible Secret's.
| Classement: | | [5 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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Disclaimer: I have not yet run this adventure. Nonetheless, I plan to do so, and set it in Bedlam City.
Strange Magic is a straight-forward adventure done up in magical monster-y trappings. The characters are warped and though some of them cross lines I wouldn't cross (really--a cybernetic werewolf?) I think they'll be fun, and I think there's a good chance that various characters will recur. Non-powered NPCs will recur and be planted in foreshadowing.
The trappings make it an ideal adventure for Hallowe'en, and the exploration of the house can be an adventure after the adventure: it isn't required as part of the main plot, but really, someone should deal with the house...
The only downside someone else pointed out: if you run this immediately after Bedlam in Bedlam, players might notice that both adventures end in what are essentially dungeon crawls. Overall, this looks like a fun evening or three, and worth the money to a harried, hurried GM.
| Classement: | | [5 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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I'm running a campaign in Bedlam City right now, and having a blast with all the excesses of the Iron Age but the technology/supers of the modern era. Excellent work.
Lots of information here--this is a huge book. There are story ideas on nearly every page-sometimes explicitly identified as such, sometimes implicit. This is well worth the money, and (because there's no universe) it's easy to drop this setting into another campaign setting.
One of the things I look for in an Iron Age setting is a warped sense of humor, because I think that if the Iron Age is going to comment on our excesses, it needs a sense of humor. Bedlam City has it in spades.
Bedlam City also has all of the other things we might find reprehensible, which make it an excellent place for characters to try to make a difference.
Flaws: I've found a small number of typos, including one cut-and-paste error, but that's very good for a product of this type. I do wish there had been a bit more on GMing a Bedlam City-only campaign, because I think there might be too much information here just for an occasional setting. However, GMs looking for less information can get the adventure Bedlam in Bedlam, which started the whole Bedlam City thing, and has the basic information.
Overall, I'm very pleased with this purchase, and am considering getting a print copy through Lulu.
| Classement: | | [4 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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I recently purchased Bedlam City. I should mention that I normally despise Iron Age settings, but I had an idea that I wanted to try out for a story-arc in my campaign, so I decided to try Bedlam out. I have to say, this is one of the best superhero roleplaying supplements I've ever had the good fortune to read. I'm particularly impressed with the emphasis the product places on systemic racism, privatization of government services, union-busting, and police brutality. It's infinitely better than similar settings like Hudson City. Well done.
| Classement: | | [5 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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Bedlam City is a grim and gritty setting with a black sense of humor. The book itself is rather large, coming in at 400 pages thoroughly detailing the important parts of the City’s history, neighborhoods, government, culture, crime, villains, and lots more. There is no “Bedlam universe” to work around making it very easy to drop into an existing campaign or easily made to be the focus of one. The few resident heroes are minor and easily dropped.
Liked: The author's warped sense of humor and Bedlam’s heavy flavor makes it feel more like a reoccurring NPC than a campaign setting. Plus its got Hitler's Brain!
Disliked: If you own the adventure “Bedlam in Bedlam” you’ll recognize several sections since they were copied and pasted from it. I was disappointed about this and would have liked a more in-depth review of the various neighborhoods. Some of the villains could have been cut to add this.
Overall I’m very happy with my purchase and look forward to inflicting this city on my players.
| Classement: | | [4 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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This nifty little product provides players with 69 different weapons in side view. While that might not sound overly impressive, it is more important than might initially be realized. The book allows game masters and players to have a better idea of what they are using and how that weapon might compare to others in the game. Likewise, it makes for nice graphics -- these are copyright free images -- on scenarios or order cards.
My only minor criticism is that some of the illustrations seem out of focus.
| Classement: | | [4 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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After buying this product I am compelled to write a review for the simple fact that I would not buy this again if given the chance. It has some good points as a product but many more elements I simply did not like. The most important of which is the length. That is a lot of pages to print out. The art is ok at best which is fine but the effect is page after page of mediocre text. The maps could be done better (such as in a product like Lockdown which has excellent maps, compared to a product like that I'd give this product a very lowrating). Lastly, the format the characters are written in could be improved away from the 'stat block' they resemble. In the end I'm weary of buying products from this publisher. The story itself is decent but it seems, for what it is, you could shorten the length of the product. There is a lot of effort in detailing lots of government agents for example when perhaps a base write up with options added and a quick list of 'personalities' would not have seemed more appropriate. In the end what you get is a large investment of time and effort on the GM's part which if you didn't like the adventure you ended up reading a bit too much information. As far as the inclusion of the city of bedlam write up? Well, why not simply include this as a smaller separate product which costs like 2 dollars. Do we really need it that detailed considering in the adventure your exactly going to explore that much of it. Its a bonus really to have it, but again, it added to the overall thought that this adventure had 'too much information'. I am writing this review to say that out of all the superlink products I bought I really don't want more of something like this. Adventures are good. A good example of one, and one I'd pay good money of are of the type listed in Gimmick's Gadgets page of the Atomic Think Tank forum. There is a 'free adventure' that involves the Toy Boy. That adventure seems to give me just want I need without overloading me, and is the essence of the plot and adventure.
| Classement: | | [2 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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A large adventure in five parts, Bedlam In Bedlam gives us the city of Bedlam, which is as corrupt as you want and is a counterpoint to your usual campaign city. The new version is extensively bookmarked, which is essential in navigating something this size.
LIKED: I liked a almost all of the adventure: good maps, clear scenes, the summary at the front helps a great deal. The setting of Bedlam is lovely (for gaming purposes) and I hope the upcoming Bedlam supplement will enlarge on it.
DISLIKED: My quibbles are pretty minor.
- There's relatively little of Bedlam in here, which makes the adventure somewhat ironic--however, it does give you a lot of material for future adventures set there
- Characters could start at the top of the page or could be in a separate booklet so you could just print them out and put them in a binder; as it is, getting the whole character means copying some of them out
- The first scene features a rather underpowered villain; if the players have Impervious Toughness (as most of the sample characters do), they essentially can't be hurt in the first scene
- The fourth scene features a lot of planning, which can make for a lot of talking; it's harder to end this scene on a cliff-hanger
- The ending, the part that makes it an Iron Age-style adventure, is something the heroes don't see. Presumably that is left for the GM or a future adventure to fill in
I think it would make a better adventure interleaved into a campaign, but it can be run as a single adventure (I did the latter). It adds a touch of the Iron Age styling in a more "regular" (Silver Age) campaign setting.
| Classement: | | [5 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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Another 13 Shades of Darkness is a supervillain sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds. The zipped file is slightly over eight megabytes in size, and contains a single PDF. The book itself is fairly massive, weighing in at two hundred thirty-three pages. Unfortunately, navigating the book isn’t as easy as it should be; there is a table of contents, but without any hyperlinks. Worse, there are no bookmarks at all.
Another 13 Shades of Darkness presents thirteen new supervillains to use in your M&M game; and in fact, it gives a lot more than that. Four additional villains are given that were in a previous adventure, to say nothing of almost twice as many new monsters and supporting cast members. Add into that the new base layout and description for the Ordo Ultima (the new supervillain team presented here), a number of new devices and spells, and four adventure ideas, and this book is packed with stuff!
The artwork here is nice, but altogether the layout feels a bit plain. All of the pages are laid out in a plain white, with the text presented simply. Maps, pictures of various characters (usually at the start of their entry) and similar illustrations help to break up the white space, but there’s still quite a bit of it throughout the book. While this does help make it more printer-friendly, there’s still something of a sense that the visual style could have been presented better.
The new villains range from thugs to godlike individuals. Six of them are individuals with no connection to any groups or other individuals, and they run the range from Misery, an ancient being who feeds on human suffering, to Code Name: Wifebeater, who treats his thug activities like a startup business. After this comes the villains of the Ordo Ultima. These guys are clearly meant to be the main villains of the book; as the majority of the new content revolves around them and their leader, Professor Purgatory. Already the star of some previous Plain Brown Wrapper Games materials, Professor Purgatory believes himself to be an angel, seeking to return to Heaven. As such, until he can, he works to purge the world of sin, which is everywhere. At “merely” a PL 18, this is a villain who, even indirectly, your PCs will love to hate. He combines the worst qualities of overwhelming arrogance, religious lunacy, and incredible power. Even if your group never meets him, many of the people in this book have felt his actions even when not personally involved, so he could easily cause trouble for your PCs without ever having met them.
Well over fifty pages are described to describing the hideout (or at least, one of them) of the Ordo Ultima, Professor Purgatory’s group. Set on a dead world, there’s a massive threat brewing there that even the Professor doesn’t know about, and while it may prove to be his undoing, the consequences are massive enough that even people on Earth may feel the ramifications if a group of heroes don’t put a stop to things.
The supporting cast are all people who have had their lives somehow touched or altered by at least one of the villains described previously. From heroes who work to stop them to old victims, to people who happened to be bystanders, there’s a lot here to work with regarding those who get affected by the actions of these evil individuals. Similarly, there are over a dozen new spells and items, most used by these bad guys for their nefarious schemes. Finally, four new adventures are laid out for PCs to undertake (many of which, surprisingly, don’t involve the over-arching Ordo Ultima, making for a nice change).
The stats and writing are mostly solid, but there are some errors that pop up throughout the book (just what is Violator Red’s PL, for example?). For the most part, these aren’t so bad, but they seem quite inconvenient when they do occur. Still, for the most part, this is solid work. While things like the lack of bookmarks and minor errors make a damper on what is otherwise a great product, there’s still a huge amount of material here, making it a virtual guarantee that you’ll get an incredible amount of use out of these villains for your M&M game. Another 13 Shades of Darkness does a great job of bringing new evils to your campaign.
| Classement: | | [4 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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R�ponse Editeur: |
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Thanks for taking the time to go over the book in such depth! This kind of feedback is essential for us. In response to your comments, we have uploaded a new, heavily bookmarked version of Another 13 Shades of Darkness, with numerous edits and fixes for the small errors you mentioned (Violator Red, for example, is now properly marked as PL 17--thanks for pointing that out). |
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James Thompson has done an outstanding job of putting this project together. I applaud you for all of, what is obviously, your hard work. Excellently done. Well worth the $9.00 or so I dropped for this product. I can't see how any M&M Mastermind can do without this tome.
Jim, sincerely, thanks for this. I'll pick up 'Bad Guys' as soon as I'm done digesting this.
LIKED: So many villains it's hard to count. Every villain is done to perfection. They are explained, with extensive notes. Though the artwork is weak, and somewhat alarming at times, it does enough to convey a visual for the outstanding work James has done.
DISLIKED: As stated above, the artwork is substandard, and, in some places, downright alarming. This notwithstanding, it's excellent.
QUALITY: Excellent
VALUE: Very Satisfied
| Classement: | | [5 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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Wow. There are a heck of a lot of weapons in this book. The range is staggering. There are catigoreies of weapons I'd never given much if any thought that are covered here. This book is amazing. Organic weapons, disposable dummy proof weapons, Dr. Evils latest weapon of doom sort of weapons, micro missles and hitech grenades, combat drones, weapons of advanced materials, energized weapons and much more. There is just so much in this book it is difficult for me to emphasize how expansive it is.
I doubt anyone could ever use these all of these weapons in a single campaign, one isn't meant to really. The "technologies" and tone vary wildly and could only ALL be present in a very lite-wahoo sort of game (good luck on trying to use them all unless of course the Emperor of the 4th dimension employs an army of mooks where everyone uses a different weapon.
LIKED: The range of imagination used and the lite style (which keeps the book from getting boring). Some campaigns could revolve about action where only two or three of the categories of weapons used here are listed. I can picture odd weapons turning up in CoC like setting to baffle 1920's investigators, cyberpunk gun runners, alien civilizations and beyond.
DISLIKED: Not too sure how these weapons would balance with other weapons already in campaigns/settings. There could be some tinkering involved to get the weapons to fit into a campaign. (not much of a fault there really).
QUALITY: Acceptable
VALUE: Very Satisfied
| Classement: | | [5 sur 5 étoiles!] |
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