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Each entry in the Justice Wheels series presents a superhero or supervillain who uses a distinctive vehicle. The characters are presented as heroes by default, with tips on how to use them as villains instead. Black Scarab strikes me as basically “Moon Knight in black”; even his origin is very similar. I presume that was intentional. Scott Harshbarger’s illustrations of Black Scarab and his car, F.A.L.C.O.N., are excellent. The page formatting is minimal and, frankly, unattractive. A relatively high number of misspellings (“anhk” instead of “ankh,” “profecient” instead of “proficient,” “machineguns” spelled as one word) and inconsistencies (especially with regard to capitalization) mar the two pages of substantive text. It’s also worth noting that Justice Wheels #1 does not seem to use the vehicle rules published in Justice Wheels #3; at the very least, it isn’t clear how Black Scarab’s vehicle puts those rules into practice. Black Scarab is an interesting enough character to add to your ICONS roster; in my case, I’m more likely to use him as a villain than offer him to a player as PC. 50¢ is a good price for a pre-statted villain with great artwork.
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Each entry in the Justice Wheels series presents a superhero or supervillain who uses a distinctive vehicle. The characters are presented as heroes by default, with tips on how to use them as villains instead. Compared to Black Scarab from Justice Wheels #1 (I haven’t read Justice Wheels #2), Bluejay is a fairly unexciting character—sort of a “poor man’s Batman” with a taser-tipped quarterstaff—and his Golden Eagle is a fairly unexciting vehicle. The page formatting is minimal and unappealing, and the text needs another round or two of copy editing. The compelling reason to get Justice Wheels #3 is the set of vehicle rules at the end, which include not only a Vehicle power but also two sets of rules for chases (one simpler and one “crunchier”). These rules are good, and worth having, even if the presentation is humdrum, beset with grammatical errors, and lacks hyperlinks to online resources referenced. I doubt that I’ll use Bluejay in my ICONS games in any capacity, but I will almost surely use the chase rules.
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This three-room dungeon ending in a shrine to Cthulhu is a perfect jumping-on point if you’re curious about the Lord Zsezse Works line and want to “try before you buy.” The LZW team’s artistic excellence is on full display here. As I mentioned before, the product basically gives you three dungeon rooms, with several options for hooking in other methods of entry if you wish. As usual, LZW provides both top-down and isometric views of the scene, which really helps to bring the environment to life. Large JPG files are included for the GM’s reference and for use with virtual tabletop software. It’s hard to argue with free, although the visual aid PDF would have been more useful if it had been laid out for portrait viewing on-screen as well as portrait-orientation printing. But really, you can’t go wrong with this map set!
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Supreme Commissar is a great villain for the Wargames setting; unlike some of the other villains in the series, he’d be hard to move to a different time period without major reworking of his backstory. In addition to a long narrative about Supreme Commissar’s history and psychology, and of course his stats, this supplement also provides stats for a typical Red Directorate agent and the Red Directorate’s helicarrier, obviously inspired by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s helicarrier. It’s a good thing the Red Directorate helicarrier has a cloaking device, because it’s painted cherry red; unfortunately, the writers can’t seem to decide whether to hyphenate “heli-carrier” (pp. 9, 12) or not (p. 7). Stats are also provided for a military jet fighter and helicopter; the artwork for these two is a completely different style from the rest (either photographs or 3D rendered models). Three long and fairly detailed adventure hooks round out the product. Better attention to proofreading (to eliminate the inconsistencies, mismatched/misplaced punctuation, and other such problems) could have raised the rating by one star.
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This villain’s origin and backstory are interesting, and author Mike Lafferty provides four fun adventure ideas using him. The writeup includes not only the simian mastermind himself, but also two types of henchmen that can serve as models for others. Sadly, this product seems not to have been proofread/copy-edited at all—or at least not successfully. The most glaring problem, standing head and shoulders above the many punctuation errors, is the product’s indecision about whether the villain’s name is spelled “Sovi-ape” (cover, pp. 2–9) or “Sovie-ape” (p. 1).
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Majestic-12 is a great twist on the “man in black.” He’s a great fit for the Wargames Cold War setting, but author Mike Lafferty also includes tips for transposing him into a more contemporary setting. As a bonus, the writeup mentions that Majestic-12 has two customary form of dress; the cover shows one, and the “character sheet” shows the other one. The product includes three fun adventure hooks that involve Majestic-12. Despite these strengths, the text needs some additional copy-editing to eliminate grammatical errors. Most importantly, somebody needs to decide whether the character’s name has a hyphen (cover, p. 1, header), a space (p. 2), or nothing (p. 3) between “Majestic” and “12.” That kind of sloppiness gives an otherwise fun product a black eye.
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Death Mask’s look and powers may remind you a bit of Dr. Doom, but this writeup gives him a unique flavor and motivation, both perfectly suited to the Wargames setting. The package also includes three fun adventure hooks and stats for the Red Guard “foot soldiers” in P.H.A.N.T.O.M.’s army.
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“The Vile Worm of the Eldritch Oak” is a Pathfinder adventure by Brave Halfling Publishing. I’m not familiar with that adventure, so I don’t know the narrative context for these maps. I do know that the artwork lives up to LZW’s pattern of excellence, without question. The package gives you battlemaps for three areas: the titular “eldritch oak” itself (cut away to reveal the small room inside), a torture chamber that apparently sits at a level below the oak, and the lair of the titular “vile worm” (who apparently lives below and is fed from the torture chamber). A bit more of a key or comments on how the artists envision the spatial relationship between the three areas would have been helpful for DMs like me who don’t know the storyline. If you want a 1" grid on the maps, use the PDF layers feature to turn on the grid layer; it’s off by default. JPG files are included for virtual tabletop users. The only things “missing” here are LZW’s famous isometric views, which always enhance their products. At any rate, this is a great map set, whether you intend to use it with the published “Vile Worm” adventure or just build your own scenario around this interesting set-piece.
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Hero Pack 2.5 presents six super-powered individuals, four of them heroes and two of them villains. While some of the heroes interest me, especially the Shepherd, a roster book serves GMs best when it’s full of villains. As in Hero Pack 2, only 1/3 of the characters presented in Hero Pack 2.5 are villains. I’d have added another star to my review if the proportion of villains were higher.
On the other hand, Hero Pack 2.5 offers GMs a couple of features that Hero Pack 2 lacked. For the two villains, Ephemera and her sidekick Sequence, Hero Pack 2.5 provides GM tips and adventure ideas in addition to an origin/personality writeup. These few paragraphs make Ephemera and Sequence significantly easier and quicker to use than the villains in Hero Pack 2.5.
Additionally, almost half of Hero Pack 2.5 consists of a mini-adventure entitled “Enter: Galacticron.” This mini-adventure includes its own supervillain, Lady Omega, along with alien soldiers and a potentially world-altering event. The mini-adventure itself is worth the price of Hero Pack 2.5.
Unfortunately, Hero Pack 2.5 seems to be more poorly composed and proofread than most Adamant Entertainment products. In particular, missing and misplaced punctuation dot the landscape. The frequency of such errors makes me wonder whether anybody actually copy-edited Hero Pack 2.5 at all.
Despite the “2.5” in the title, the duplication of Hero Pack 2’s cover, and the brief errata for Hero Pack 2 on the first page, Hero Pack 2.5 is really an independent product. You don’t need Hero Pack 2 to use Hero Pack 2.5, and you don’t need Hero Pack 2.5 to complete Hero Pack 2.
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A product like this pulls me in two directions. On the one hand, I love seeing what my fellow ICONS fans have created in their own worlds. On the other hand, a book full of superheroes—emphasis on “heroes”—doesn’t actually add much to my ICONS games. A typical ICONS GM already has plenty of heroes in his or her world, namely, the player characters. Most GMs would be better served by a villain pack instead of a hero pack. Hero Pack 2 does, in fact, include eleven villains, but that’s barely a third of the 30 characters featured.
Unlike the original Hero Pack, where villains were grouped together after heroes and called out with different background artwork, Hero Pack 2 sorts heroes and villains together, just placing all the characters in alphabetical order. No graphic cue differentiates villains from heroes, nor are villains marked as such in the table of contents. The only way to tell the difference is by the villains’ lack of Determination values (they have asterisks instead).
In terms of the quality of content, Hero Pack 2 is a bit like a roller coaster. Dan Houser’s artwork is, as always, every good and evocative. In my opinion, he did particularly good jobs on Alien Mastermind, Necrovore, Scarlet Sabre, and Shadowform. On the other hand, Kumbhakarna and Technomage need to give Wonder Man’s and Dr. Doom’s costumes back, and the artwork for Hekate comes off oddly, making it a little hard to tell at first which way she’s facing. Since the various heroes and villains were all designed by different people, some are naturally better than others. A few stand out from the pack. Mechanically, Blueshift comes off as basically a super-smart Flash, but his origin and backstory are rich for the space allotted. Cancer is a compelling villain in a very, very creepy way. Gravedigger is pretty funny. The Mook is eminently useful and will very likely find his (their) way into adventures that I run. Maybe it’s just his resemblance to Carnage, but I found Necrovore an intriguing villain, rife with possibilities.
Unfortunately, the Grammar Gremlin started working his impish mischief right from the beginning, inserting a comma splice into the very first page and scattering punctuation errors and inconsistencies (such as American marks used in British positions) throughout the book. He also apparently rampaged through the book, snatching the quotation marks away from some catchphrases (but not others) and peppering quotations with inconsistent capitalization. He planted tense-change bombs in several characters’ origins, resulting in inexplicable shifts from past to present. He even replaced the Arabic numeral 2, used in the product’s title on the front cover, with a Roman numeral II in the interior page headers.
If you want to see some other ICONS players’ superheroes and perhaps use them as NPCs in your own world, by all means buy Hero Pack 2. If you’re mainly looking for supervillains, you’ll only get eleven of them from this product, and not all eleven are equally interesting. On balance, I’d consider Hero Pack 2 a worthwhile purchase, as long as you know the hero-villain ratio going in.
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A large ship—defined as a pirate ship in the product title, but equally suited to be an imperial warship or something like that—plies the sea in this large map by Jonathan Roberts. Although this map pack only provides the top deck of the ship (with no interior views), two things make it stand out from similar products. First, Roberts included the sails, making them nearly transparent so that you can see their positions without allowing them to obscure the deck beneath. Most printable ship packs simply omit the sails. Second, Roberts mounted ballistae on the deck of his pirate ship, whereas most such products give you cannon—anachronistic in many fantasy RPGs. Roberts also gives you a generous wide margin of water-only tiles to make room for bringing other ships, or monstrous sea creatures, alongside.
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I don’t know anything about the Torn World setting, but I very much like this large map of a ruined keep. The product includes an isometric view of the keep to help give you a 3D perspective. The artwork is very nice, although the scattered displaced bricks look somewhat odd; they almost seem to float above the ground. The publisher used a full 8" x 10" for the tiles, so you’re won’t be able to use this map effectively if your printer leaves more than a 1/4" margin on any side of the printed page. The product also includes files for using the map via online virtual tabletops—an increasingly important consideration.
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This well-conceived and well-executed supplement gives DMs a robust toolkit for incorporating plagues into fantasy role-playing campaigns. The crunchy parts are for D&D 4e, but the first three (of five) chapters are largely crunch-free and could be used by GMs running any system. Those first three chapters describe the onset, progress, and aftermath of a plague. Author Creighton Broadhurst has done a particularly good job in these chapters of balancing realism/verisimilitude with compelling and efficient gameplay. Chapters 4 and 5 present 4e-specific options for players and DMs, including magic items, rituals, disease stat blocks, skill challenges, monsters, and even a god of disease. The text seems to have been well-edited, with very few grammatical errors slipping through. The typography needs more polish; in particular, using Times New Roman for the body text and Georgia for the footnotes creates an unpleasant clash of serifs. Aside from these relatively minor aesthetic points, I wholeheartedly recommend this supplement.
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Which side will your players choose in the clash between heroes for and against the Superhuman Registration Act? Whether your group wants to join Iron Man in enforcing the law, or to join Captain America in standing up for individual freedom, you’ll find plenty of depth in the Civil War Event Book for compelling gameplay. The book even provides a new option called “troupe play” to enable players to run multiple characters, perhaps even on opposite sides of a conflict—and no other recent comics event has been more ideal for promoting player vs. player combat.
The event book lays out the events of the superhero civil war in three acts: “Road to Civil War” (the SHRA passes at the end of this event), “Registration,” and “Rocket’s Red Glare.” Each act includes multiple action and transition scenes, with great role-playing and combat/action opportunities for heroes on both sides of the SHRA debate. The presence of other opportunistic factions like AIM, Hydra, Atlantis, and Wakanda complicate matters, of course.
Thirty-two superhero datafiles appear in the “Hero Datafiles” section of the book. Comparing the versions of heroes that appear both here and in the basic game gives a great sense of how the MHR game can treat “snapshots” of heroes at different points in their careers. Shorter datafiles for various allies and enemies—which, in this event, are terms at least partially relative to which side of the SHRA you’re on—appear throughout the book at opportune moments. Fortunately, there’s a complete index to the datafiles at the end of the event book, so you can easily find the various supervillains and supporting cast wherever they appear.
You can buy the Civil War Event Book in “essentials” and “premium” flavors. The only difference is that the premium edition includes the Operations Manual, for those who don’t already own the basic game.
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Which side will your players choose in the clash between heroes for and against the Superhuman Registration Act? Whether your group wants to join Iron Man in enforcing the law, or to join Captain America in standing up for individual freedom, you’ll find plenty of depth in the Civil War Event Book for compelling gameplay. The book even provides a new option called “troupe play” to enable players to run multiple characters, perhaps even on opposite sides of a conflict—and no other recent comics event has been more ideal for promoting player vs. player combat.
The event book lays out the events of the superhero civil war in three acts: “Road to Civil War” (the SHRA passes at the end of this event), “Registration,” and “Rocket’s Red Glare.” Each act includes multiple action and transition scenes, with great role-playing and combat/action opportunities for heroes on both sides of the SHRA debate. The presence of other opportunistic factions like AIM, Hydra, Atlantis, and Wakanda complicate matters, of course.
Thirty-two superhero datafiles appear in the “Hero Datafiles” section of the book. Comparing the versions of heroes that appear both here and in the basic game gives a great sense of how the MHR game can treat “snapshots” of heroes at different points in their careers. Shorter datafiles for various allies and enemies—which, in this event, are terms at least partially relative to which side of the SHRA you’re on—appear throughout the book at opportune moments. Fortunately, there’s a complete index to the datafiles at the end of the event book, so you can easily find the various supervillains and supporting cast wherever they appear.
You can buy the Civil War Event Book in “essentials” and “premium” flavors. The only difference is that the premium edition includes the Operations Manual, for those who don’t already own the basic game.
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