Review: Arcane Power

Arcane Power

Following my positive experiences with Martial Power, I decided to pre-order Arcane Power, the new fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons supplement that deals with additional options for the arcane classes:  bard, sorcerer, swordmage, warlock, and wizard.  Based on my initial reading, I feel pretty confident about saying that the Power line continues to display a pretty high standard of quality.  Class-based supplements have been pretty ubiquitous in D&D since the second edition, and their quality has varied, but like Martial Power, this book seems to fall toward the top of the heap.

Arcane Power is a 160-page book, and there’s a lot crammed into it; it felt a little longer than Martial Power to me, although it’s the same page count.  Physically, it seems similar to other fourth-edition hardcovers; its layout, binding, and so forth all seem decent.  Some people have reported problems with ink smudging in their 4e books; I’ve never experienced any such issues, but if you have, the ink and paper seem about the same to me, too, so that might be something to watch for.

Content is split up into five chapters by class, each of which covers new powers, builds, class features, and paragon paths for its respective class, and a sixth chapter including new feats, familiars, epic destinies, rituals, and a handful of magic items (tomes, for the new wizard build).

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Review: Open Game Table Anthology, Volume 1

I’ve mentioned Open Game Table: The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs, Volume 1 before, but last week I got my hands on the hard copy and set to reading it.  The long and the short of it:  It met my expectations (and they were high) in every way.

Jonathan Jacobs, of The Core Mechanic, brought the project together quickly and professionally.  He’d probably be the first to tell you he didn’t do it alone, but the time and effort he put into this went way beyond a couple of blog posts — not just collecting the various posts that went into the anthology, but rounding up some artist volunteers, investigating means of distributing the final product, even getting Wolfgang Baur to write a foreword.  That shows in the quality of the finished book.  This is a professional product.  A round of applause here for him.

So, what’s in the book?

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The Pieces of Gestalt

Imagine a world in which personifications of concepts — Archetypes such as Winter, Death, and Determination — existed, having sprung to life in 1989.  Now imagine that, in this world, a fairly large number of these personifications, these living symbols, chose to put on colorful costumes and become superheroes and supervillains.  That’s the high concept of Scott Bennie’s campaign setting Gestalt: the Hero Within, which I was able to review thanks to Ed Healy of Atomic Array.

In some ways, this is not such a stretch for a superhero game.  As Bennie writes in his introduction to the first chapter, “[a]ll fiction deals in archetypes, [and] comic books apply these symbols more consciously than other fictional forms.”  The statement might be open for debate, but clearly comic books deal with archetypes.  Bennie intends for Gestalt to go one step further, though:  the characters are not making use of those archetypes; instead, the characters are the archetypes.  The Gestalt (Bennie’s name for such a living symbol) of Winter might have cold and ice powers, but he’s not just a guy with cold and ice powers — he’s a living representation of Winter.  The Gestalt of Murder isn’t just a common serial killer, or even an uncommon one — he’s Murder personified.

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Review: Player’s Handbook 2

The Player’s Handbook 2 has been out for a week or so now, with sneak previews running about a week before that in several roleplaying blogs, but I’ve got some musings about where it takes the game.  Before that, though, I offer my brief review:  It’s partly silly and mostly good.  Here’s a more specific rundown:

It’s got 5 new races, 8 new classes, and a bunch of new feats, magic items, rituals, and epic destinies.  (It’s also got a couple pages of errata, notably the new Stealth rules, but that’s not really the focus here.)  The classes include two divine, two arcane, and four primal, and, at least at first read, seem to compare reasonably to those in the first PHB, being neither too much stronger nor too much weaker in general.  The races are a mixed bag.  The content as a whole is a mix of new material and updated versions of old favorites.

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I Watch the Watchmen

Watched, rather.  And it was good.  Some spoilers below, though I’m not sure whether spoilers really apply to movies based on comics published more than two decades ago.

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