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More of a campaign seed or a starting point than an adventure, Small Town Hero offers a good sandbox but not as much story unity as I would have liked.
Pro:
- You get quite a bit of text for very little money: you get the adventure/campaign (90 pages), the Stonewell Player's Guide (19 pages), and the Stonewell GM's Guide(34 pages). The Player's Guide contains information not in the GM's guide. I might quibble with some--can a town of 9000 support that many gangs? There are at most, what, 90 gang members in town, if it's as gang-ridden as Illinois,
- Lots of villains to work with.
- Easy to convert to ICONS, HERO, M&M, DC Heroes, those being the systems I know the best—nothing funky about the characters.
- Liked the .rtf file for villain descriptions.
Con:
- I would have loved an overview, a guide to the optional scenes and what each scene accomplished.
- Without bookmarks, hard to navigate. Links in a Table of Contents are not enough.
- Not much unity to the storyline. There are three plots and one of them doesn't feel like it makes much sense.
- The story takes about a month to unfold. Your characters can't fly in, help, and leave.
Look, you buy a systemless adventure, you expect some work. I feel like I needed to do the wrong kind of work. For instance, I would have liked to see an overview and a scene by scene breakdown, pointing out what each character's purpose in the scene was, so I could do system-specific substitutions. Instead, I had to do that breakdown. Yes, that would cost more. On the other hand, this will be a great set of encounters to introduce tween boys to superhero roleplaying.
It wasn't what I wanted, but it's a solid medium in my eyes.
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