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Heroic Toolkits: Vehicles (Revised) $4.98
Publisher: Gun Metal Games
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by John G. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/09/2008 11:27:05

A note about me: I received a free pdf of this product for the purposes of a review. My biases include a lot of experience playing and gamemastering True20 in several genres. I love the True20 system, quirks and all. I also tend to love crunchy and customizable equipment, gear, and vehicle lists in my games. However, I have also been disappointed by my share of poorly-designed equipment sourcebooks, so I think I’m looking at this with a fairly critical eye.

If you don’t like to read long reviews, I’ll give you the short, short version: Vehicles is a sourcebook for the True20 system. Inside you’ll find statistics for vehicles for use in the major roleplaying genres, as well as new rules (feats, attributes, and Narrator tools) to help you use them. The new rules are just right—elegant enough to pick up quickly, and short enough to keep Vehicles from being a splatbook. I am looking forward to using Vehicles in the next True20 game that I run. (Given that my FLGS loves True20, I don’t think I’ll have a problem getting a game together). There are a few issues that crop up, but overall this is a very polished product.

First Look: I look for several critical features in a pdf right away, and Vehicles has them all. The pdf is bookmarked, there is an index that seems to be complete (I didn’t thoroughly check it, but I have navigated the pdf several times and found no missing entries), and the table of contents is hyperlinked; thus Vehicles is easy to navigate.

Artwork: I’m listing this topic early, because the art provides a feel and a look for the product. Overall, I would prefer either good quality artwork, or no artwork at all. There is one artist, Jason Waldon, so the style of art is consistent throughout the book. I am happy to say that the artwork is very good. I would compare the artwork to that of the core True20 books, which boast some well-known artists. All artwork except for the cover is black and white.

The cover depicts vehicles from three different genres: a cart full of bestial humanoids toting a primitive cannon, drawn by a rhinoceros. Just above is an M1 Abrams Battle Tank (military enthusiasts, please feel free to correct me—modern roleplaying has never been my cup of tea). Behind and above the tank is what looks like a partially-constructed spaceship/flying saucer atop a vortex of blue energy. The title mostly obscures this third vehicle, so it’s difficult to tell exactly what it is. Essentially the cover piece suggests that Vehicles is a toolkit for using (and possibly designing), well, vehicles for a variety of eras and genres. Despite being partially obscured by the title, the cover piece succeeded in drawing me in.

The second piece of art depicts two biplanes in a dogfight. It’s a dynamic, engaging picture. It also suggests that this heroic toolkit might enhance True20’s rules for vehicular combat and pursuit. A lot of folks in the OGL era have tried this, and only a few have come up with anything that really works (SpyCraft comes to mind). Will there be dogfighting rules? Read on!

There is a fair amount of artwork here—mostly quarter-page pieces, but there are a couple of full-page pieces. The interior artwork covers a variety of designs and eras—there are tall ships, steampunk-type orc cannons, flying cars right out of Blade Runner, starships, and genre-blending vehicles as well. In all, the artwork helps to stir the imagination, and for me it has made the toolkit much easier to use. (I found one piece particularly intriguing—a character exploring the remains of crashed spaceships, protected by a transparent bubble, which rolls along the ground. “American Gladiators in Spaaaaaaace!”)

Vehicles, chapter by chapter

Chapter 1: Resolution of Vehicle Action

Vehicles uses the most up-to-date True20 rules. True20’s original vehicle rules had a fair amount of errors and miscalculations, and there is a free set of errata on Green Ronin’s website. Vehicles wisely used these up-to-date rules. This might seem like a small thing, but I have run into many publishers (even larger publishers) that just don’t do their homework.

I am working from the True20 Pocket Player’s Guide; I don’t currently have any other expansions. Technothrillers, another RDP product, is mentioned as being compatible, but this ruleset is not required to use Vehicles. That’s about all the RDP marketing you’ll see in this product—several plugs for Technothrillers. There are several occasions where Vehicles refers to Technothrillers for a rule, but a rule of thumb is offered in its place. Vehicles assumes you are working only from the True20 core rules (and when the Companion expansions are mentioned, Vehicles has concise notes for using them as well. In some cases, Vehicles actually provides a brief summary of the Companion rules if those are necessary—a nice gesture for the cash-challenged, and not out of bounds, as the Companion is now part of the True20 core book).

Vehicles takes the basic True20 vehicles rules and expands on them. For those unfamiliar with True20, vehicles have several characteristics just like characters: Strength, Toughness, etc. This really helped integrate play, but one attribute, Speed, ironically tended to slow things down. True20 vehicles were assigned a Speed attribute based on the vehicle’s top speed (a motorcycle goes about 150 mph, while a space battleship tops out at about 250,000 mph). True20’s Speed attribute was clunky, to say the least, in a very sparse Vehicles section. When GMing True20 scifi games, I tended to ditch True20 in vehicular combat situations, and instead use tabletop rules Silent Death or Full Thrust (depending on scale) instead of True20. I think that Vehicles provides a simple expansion to the True20 Vehicle rules. Vehicles adds a Speed Rating (SR; from 0 to 7) which is relative to scale (and there are scales ranging from Fantasy Vehicles to Space Vehicles). Suggested “mph” speed ratings are given for each scale, but Vehicles stresses that these are up to the GM. A first read helps this seem a lot more playable; I can see easily using SR for space vehicles (for example) with miniatures on a tabletop or hex grid. Using these same rules, I could also very easily narrate and adjudicate the action without any miniatures or diagram.

Vehicles adds two other attributes: Acceleration (Acc), which determines how quickly and how often a vehicle can change its SR, and a Stability Rating, which helps you figure out what happens when your driver fails a Pilot skill roll. The Acceleration attribute entry also includes a description of how braking and hard braking affect a vehicle’s speed. Stability has a short entry, and refers the reader to an entry later in the document. I tend to find those kinds of “see below” entries to be somewhat annoying, but at least RDV included a brief explanation of how and when to use a Stability attribute.

The three new attributes make a lot of sense and add a few easy-to-understand (but necessary) concepts to a vehicle’s profile. But how do they work in practice? I can see only two reasons for adding new attributes to a core ruleset: 1. The old attributes did not work well as written; 2. The new attributes add additional flavor to the roleplaying without complicating things unnecessarily. I ran through a couple of examples on my own, and I’m happy to say that these new attributes fall into the latter category:

So let’s take the new attributes for a test drive. Let’s say I am driving my 2002 Chevy Cavalier to work down the winding country road on which I live. It took me all of a 10 seconds to figure out the stats of my car from the Mid-Size Car entry: Strength 10, SR 5, Acc 2, Stability 9, Defense 8, Toughness 9. (On a whim, before I looked it up, I tried statting out my car intuitively, and came very close to the sourcebook’s values. So they seem to make sense). So about 5 miles down the road, a deer dashes in front of me. The GM rules that I don’t even have time to hit the brakes. I make a Drive check, which I fail by 7. 7 is less than the Stability rating of my car, so I don’t crash; instead, I have a “minor mishap” (I suffer minor structural damage). I swerve, miss the deer and overcorrect, then run over a huge pothole, which causes a hubcap to fly off. I recover the hubcap, keep driving and the deer gets away safely. According to the new rules, if I missed my check by more than a 9, I would have hit the deer and damaged my car (and there are rules for a car hitting a pedestrian, as well as how much damage I would take from the impact). Stability is easy to add to your game and doesn’t overly complicate anything.

(Incidentally, Vehicles provides some specific—but adaptable—rules about how I would come up with the Base Difficulty for my Drive check).

Further down the road, I round a bend, only to see a large pickup truck pull right out in front of me. He’s taking up the entire road, so instead of swerving I have to see if I can stop. I’m moving along at SR 4, and I’ve got one round to come to a full stop. A combination of my car’s Acc rating and hard braking (requiring a Drive check, which I pass) bring me to SR 0. Whew! Again, SR was easy to use—much easier than the Speed attribute of standard True20. The driver of the truck gives me the finger, then accelerates away. Deciding not to let this insult go unanswered, I accelerate after the truck, undaunted by the large dog in the passenger’s seat and the gun rack in the back. You may, at this point, surmise that I do not have a positive Wisdom modifier!

We now come to the vehicle combat rules. Another plug for Technothrillers, then we dive into a simple vehicle combat system. It’s abstract: there are range categories with approximate ranges; the approximate ranges are different if you’re engaging in ground, air, waterborne, or space combat. Changing a range category requires a simple Drive or Pilot Check.

Back to the country road—I pass my Drive checks and catch up to the truck. Blinded by rage, I attempt to ram him. (Oddly enough, Bumping and Ramming are the only two entries under the “Special Vehicle Maneuvers” section. Shouldn’t there be more? Honestly, Vehicles has enough rules for everything else that I couldn’t think of any. Why not just call the section “Bumping and Ramming?”) I fail the opposed Drive check AND the Stability roll (I’m already incorporating the new attribute; it’s that easy). So my car veers off the road and crashes. Since I don’t have Technothrillers, Vehicls gives me a rule of thumb: I take damage equal to double my vehicle’s SR. Plain and simple.

In addition to the new attributes, Vehicles provides examples of how I can use existing skills while on board a vehicle. Want to go barnstorming? Make an Acrobatics check. Want to steal a car? Make a Disable Device check. Want to tail someone without being noticed? Make a Stealth check. The examples provided are clear, but they all seemed fairly obvious. This would detract from the product if the True20 core rules included a better vehicle section; as it is, Vehicles seems to read like an essential part of True20 the further I get into it.

Chapter 2: Vehicle-Related Feats. This chapter is blessedly short. There are seven new feats, divided between piloting and repair. These new feats add new possibilities to make combat more exciting—whether you are piloting the vehicle or sitting in the engine room trying to coax one more phasesr shot out of the dilithium crystals. One problem does crop up: the new feats will make characters who take them more powerful than characters who use the core rules—at least when they get behind the wheel. The new starships book for the Star Wars Saga Edition seems to have the same problem (I mention this particular system because there are several rule parallels with True20). Vehicles does its best to avoid this issue by making the feats purely optional. However, many of the rule variants or refinements depend on some of these feats. This is a very minor quirk, and it’s unavoidable with most sourcebooks. (Besides, the new feats look to be a lot of fun).

The Vehicle Combat feat is refined: characters must now take this feat for each type of vehicle. This makes a lot of sense, and I suspect it has already been a house rule for many True20 players. If I am playing in a “Mad Max” campaign, why should I be able to also proficiently pilot a sailboat?

Chapters 3-5: the Vehicles So you’re probably wondering: are there any actual vehicles in this product? Yes! There are vehicles, stats, and modifications enough to please any crunch addict. The first section, Fantasy and Low-Tech Vehicles, provides almost 3 dozen new vehicles and several new weapons (and this is one of the shorter sections). The vehicles range from the mundane (horse and buggy) to the, well, fantastic (“Carriage of the Gothic Lord.”) There are sections on Supernatural Vehicles (Steampunk, SpellJammer, or Techno-Wizardry, anyone?), Modern Vehicles (which includes Industrial Age, Golden Age, and Modern Age), and Science Fiction (both near and far future vehicles). There is a nice breadth of vehicles in each section, from everyday examples to military and exotic types. I’m especially taken with this product, because it includes the stats (including carrying capacity) for the “Beer Wagon.”

There is a lot crammed in here, and I’m happy to say that quality does not suffer. Modifying or customizing vehicles is easy (and fun, if you don’t mind simply using your intuition). This is not a sourcebook to buy if you want to debate endlessly on the forums about the minutiae of vehicle specs. If you don’t agree with a vehicles stats as written (I, for one, thought that Vehicles gave my car better specs than it deserves), change them! You’ll have plenty of other examples within the genre as benchmarks.

Each vehicle genre section includes a few story/scenario ideas. Most of these are not revolutionary (is there anything new under the gaming sun, really?), but they are good. I found myself thinking of new campaign ideas for each of the sections.

Chapter 6: Narrating Vehicle Action

The aforementioned “dogfight” illustration gave me great hope that there would be some good dogfighting rules in Vehicles. This chapter doesn’t disappoint. The dogfight rules are, like the other rules in this product, simple riffs on the existing True20 core rules. The rules hinge on which combatant is first aware of the other, and they do a good job of simulating the “wheeling, chaotic nature” of a dogfight. Reading through the dogfight rules was a little confusing (due to my attention span being shortened somewhat by age and a toddler in the house). Vehicles is full of helpful tables to explain rule variants, and a table for the dogfight rules would have been very helpful here.

There is also a nice section in this chapter (“Giving Everyone Something To Do”) that explains how some skills can be used to turn mere passenger PC’s into active participants.

There is a very short vehicle design section. I mentioned above that this is an intuitive process; Vehicles gives the example of creating a Gremlin using the stats for a Compact Car as a baseline. There are no hard-and-fast rules. I had expected Vehicles to include a vehicle design system, and I had expected to be disappointed if such a system was not included. However, Vehicles mentions that the True20 Companion (now part of the core rules) and Mecha vs. Kaiju both have such systems. Why complicate things further by creating yet another system? I have been playing around with the intuitive approach, designing my own vehicles using the wealth of examples, and I have found it quite entertaining.

Vehicles closes by reminding the reader that the story should take precedence over the rules.

Apart from the meat of the product, Vehicles provides some minor (but helpful) clarifications. For example, Vehicles helps to explain just how a character wielding an assault rifle could damage a Battleship with a Finesse Attack (or just how a small, one-man fighter could destroy a Battle Station). Some of the clarifications seem redundant or obvious (such as Repairing Vehicles), but the majority are very helpful. I now have rules for vehicles carrying more than their capacity, rules for when vehicles catch fire, and rules for routine maintenance and breakdowns. These are all very handy and they do indeed expand possibilities from the core rules.

Conclusion: See my short, short version above. Vehicles suffers from a very few quirks such as occasional redundancy, a few too many plugs for Technothrillers, and the lack of a table to better explain the dogfight rules. In spite of these very minor flaws, Vehicles is what a sourcebook ought to be. The new rules rarely replace the core rules; for the most part, they make using the core rules more enjoyable (and streamlined) in their particular context (in this case, in a vehicle). Highlights include the plethora of statted-out vehicles, the dogfighting rules, and the Narrating chapter.

The Score: I’m giving Vehicles a 4 for both style and substance (I’d give it a 5, but I haven’t yet seen a product in 15 years of gaming that actually, objectively, deserves a 5). Vehicles exceeds expectations for its price and format, and I highly recommend this product for anyone who uses the True20 system. (In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that RDP plug Vehicles in its up-and-coming Reign of Discordia sci-fi setting).



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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