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A Flames Rising Review:
First, let’s talk about what the four files are in this PDF package. The main file is the game itself, a fourteen page set-up to a story about a forgotten Hollywood set. The second file is a nine page primer for new players. Third is thirty-eight pages of character sheets. The fourth and final file is ten pages of reference sheets. Considering that the new player primer and reference sheets may have to be printed multiple times, storytellers may want to charge admission to this game to off-set printing costs. Yep, I’m still seeing no printer friendly options despite all my “helpful” suggestions with my reviews.
I find the story intriguing because it taps upon a time in Hollywood when it was still fascinating. Many of the Kindred feel the same way, ushering in the story. The thirty plus characters in this adventure (a social/mental adventure with next to no physical altercations) are a properly conceived and diverse mix of film makers, lawyers, criminals, v ... [read full review]
Rating:  [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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A Flames Rising Review.
The layout to the PDF is amazing. Sometimes I feel the borders in games are a little hit and miss; however, the borders to this character collection fit perfectly. Angst-driven artwork works as a header and alternates between every other page. The side and bottom borders are a nice green-grey color keeping in synch with other releases in this line. I’m always a fan for “printer-friendly” versions of White Wolf material, but it’s harder to argue with such nice work.
The artwork in this collection shows an improvement in the collections. Artwork is expensive, especially for smaller releases; nevertheless, the artwork in this collection remains solid throughout. The artwork merely depicts the characters and, when appropriate, their compacts or conspiracies.
The Keepers’ writing is what won me over for this PDF. There are a handful of players in my group that would have decade-plus buttons if I were inclined to issue them. One fella, we’ll call him Court, h ... [read full review]
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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A Flames Rising Review:
Jess Hartley’s group of pre-generated characters comes from Changeling: the Lost. She follows the typical road that allows each character to fill a needed spot in the group. For example, the Beast Aslan (the Lion-O chap on the front page) is the team’s muscle. There is nothing wrong with going this course as most players work to create just such a group. It allows the entire group a chance to shine throughout most sessions. These characters, for me, seem to have a bit in common with the Refuse. They are outsiders who are haunted by their past.
Sometimes this haunting is literal, such as in Romeo’s case.
Jess Hartley’s fantastic writing, particularly at the end of the booklet, helps prime ideas. Her characters, while created for pick-up purposes, have long-reaching goals the suggest long-term use. It doesn’t have to be this way, but the materials are there. She is forced to spend a little too much space on playing these characters with one of them missin ... [read full review]
Rating:  [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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A Flames Rising Review:
Most players enjoy something tangible given to them in a game. It can be as simple as dice, poker chips, and a character sheet; nevertheless, the experience deepens when newspaper articles, photos, and varied memorabilia are also handed out. People are bound by their senses.
The more senses used during a game greatly intensifies the overall experience. Attack them all. While the Testament of Longinus won’t smell like a centuries old text, it’s still a masterfully fun little addition to the World of Darkness (and you can always check-out an old book from the library to relate that old smell for your players). This psudo-document follows the story of a self-described “antichrist” as he moves from criminal to vampire to . . . something more.
I normally go over a game’s layout first, but I’ll tackle artwork first today. The reason is simple. The nature of this product permits it to have no artwork. While it is true that some holy texts do have classically r ... [read full review]
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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A Flames Rising Review:
a|state is a game, designed by Contested Ground Studios, that deals with finding that soft, white light of hope in the murky depths of poverty, crime, and The City.
a|state’s setting is post-apocalyptic futurism, but with a few twists. Unlike other post-apocalyptic settings, there are a lot of unknowns. Something happened, something that ripped the fabric of modern-day reality off from civilization’s spoiled body. Technology is limited, identities are a luxury, and survival of the fittest is a way of life—not just a catch phrase. The City, assuredly a conglomeration of some things that “were”, has no name. In this place with no name, you battle against your greatest enemy—yourself.
Thematically, a|state reaches to a place that rests within all of us. It is a place that houses a faint glimmer of hope that somehow, some way or another, begs to be let out. This is not a game about combat, who gets the most stuff, or who levels up the fastest. This isn’t ab ... [read full review]
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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A FlamesRising.com Review:
12 to Midnight presents its first horror anthology, a twelve author collection centered around their well-established Pinebox, Texas setting. Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas contains an impressively wide scope of stories (and horrors) while still maintaining certain key threads and locales throughout. There are even repeated nods back to various 12 to Midnight adventures like Skinwalker.
It won’t take long for me to talk about the artwork for the anthology. Jeff Varnes cover depicts what must be an image from within the Big Thicket, one of those recurring locales in the book. It’s simplicity makes it work. Any temptation to depict a horror of some sort would have probably stalled. Also, the artwork evokes common and well-ingrained childhood fears of being alone in the woods. Inside, there are two pages of cartography by T.C. Largent. One shows a rather close look at Pinebox, Texas and the other is devoted to Golan County.
Diving into these stories fel ... [read full review]
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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A Flames Rising Review:
Wolfsheim is a mini-adventure for Scion, stand alone, suitable for an evening’s play or as a pick-up or convention game, though it will need experienced characters to be pre-generated in such an instance. It’s fairly straightforward, if a little rail-roady (as most of these adventures from White Wolf have been) and it could easily be shifted in space and time from its modern, Germanic setting to just about anywhere or anywhen.
The basic storyline is that of Yojimbo, the famous Japanese samurai story, a town caught between two predatory groups and the wanderers coming in, upsetting the balance between the people and their antagonists and, hopefully, causing a new peace to come about (through a great deal of bloodshed in the middle).
Wolfsheim is 44 pages, landscape - so suitable for laptop oriented gaming - of adventure with a short introduction and quite a few pages of organisational material, cuecards and NPC stat cards in the back. The meat of the adv ... [read full review]
Rating:  [3 of 5 Stars!] |
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A Flames Rising Review:
White Wolf experiments with “ready-made player-characters” for those gaming groups on the go. Two such PDFs already exist, but I’ll only be talking about the Slaughterhouse Five. The PDF is 26 pages (no ads) devoted to the description of five player-characters and a bit of the world they live in. It’s an interesting idea, so let’s see how I felt it played out.
A few years ago, I wouldn’t have wanted to be fed a handful of pre-made characters to push onto my gaming group. It’s too much fun to make your own character. Right? Once upon a time, I would answered “yes” to that question without hesitation. I’ll now mend my answer to “yes, usually.” Why do I now permit myself to sacrifice creativity for availability? First, I no longer believe that question is even valid. The biggest reason why is pointed out by the blurb for the game. Healthy gaming groups are constantly evolving, trying out new games or new takes on old games. With all the transformations, chara ... [read full review]
Rating: [3 of 5 Stars!] |
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A Flames Rising Review:
Once upon a time, my friend David ran a Delta Green game. David was a huge fan of the in-game prop, especially when it came to this particular campaign. If our clues were photographs, we generally had photographs in our paws. If the clue was a recording of some nature, then we also received that. I mention this because White Wolf’s new Collection of Horrors line appears to follow in his beliefs that props are good things. CoH is associated with the Hunter the Vigil line as each entry describes a scene (using the SAS platform) that can either be fitted into an already existing campaign, spark a new campaign, or simply fill up a night’s worth of gaming.
One nice thing about these focused scenes is that, despite their fixation, these adventures won’t really railroad players. Most of the scenes are open, not closed. Once the chief action takes place, players will be able to run wildly in reaction. This is doubly true when these scenes are cleanly added to an a ... [read full review]
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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A Flames Rising Review:
The first fiction novel for Vampire: The Requiem, a game line produced by White Wolf, A Hunger Like Fire sets the tone for some colorful characters and intriguing plot twists.
Written by Greg Stolze, the novel begins with a character narration by Bruce, a newly-changed vampire. New to being an undead, but not authorized by the Prince of Chicago, Prince Maxwell. After reading the first two pages, I felt compelled to read further. While first person narration can get tricky, Stolze handles it well by adding some interesting character quirks. For example, the undead Bruce Miner has an attachment to his dog, Peaches. Of course, he has to use his special vampiric ability to get close to animals, but nonetheless it’s a good tie-in between game mechanics and a fictional character.
As I read further into the novel, I was challenged by the constantly changing character point-of-view. In order to keep up with the intensity of the characters, I treated the novel l ... [read full review]
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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The magazine comes in a robust 60 pages. That is not as big as their major competitor, but it is very, very, full. The initial editorial lays out all of the article types that the magazine plans to pursue in the coming quarters and every one seems interesting and with a constant mind toward having something for all players. There was always an eye toward having both solid fluff (flavor) and rules (crunch) in each article. More over, a focus on making sure the flavor and crunch aligned. Readers will notice if there is a disconnect and will be turned off by a product that does a bad job of aligning these two very important aspects of game design. That is not the case here.
The articles are similar to classic articles we, as a gaming generation, have all grown up with. There are articles that detail new weapons and talk about the fighters that use them, articles that introduce a new god, his followers and other important doctrines of the faith. In short, once again, Aeryn “Blackdirge” ... [read full review]
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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While the cover art left much to be desired, the overall layout again was stylish with its widescreen format. I also like the icon detailing the number of scenes, physical, mental, and social difficult settings, and suggested experience levels for the adventure. This makes it absurdly easy for a Storyteller to pick up the right adventure for the right group. The settings to the adventure fully lived up to its iconic promise.
The adventure, rich with promise, is a bit of a letdown. The single strongest aspect to it is the time frame. Once the players are introduced to the adventure’s hook, they have a limited amount of time to make things right. Sadly, the time frame also becomes a bit of an unwanted hassle for this adventure. Answering the question of “what is right” proves to have more than two dozen written possibilities (great!). Once you include the players and their own imagined world, those possibilities are endless (awesome!). No storyteller wants their players to be mired do ... [read full review]
Rating: [3 of 5 Stars!] |
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White Wolf takes us back to the Eighties in New Wave Requiem (WW25320). The decision to turn back the clock nearly twenty five years seems to be a brilliant one (Yes, I did say TWENTY FIVE years). Sob. Vampire: the Masquerade hit bookshelves in 1991, so readers never really got a feel for the Reagan Era of gaming. This appears to be their attempt at remedying that issue. This slim supplement weighs in at eighty-one pages; however, it wastes no space with ads (an oddity considering the waste the 1980s created). There are a few pages devoted solely to pieces of art, but these terrific characterizations demand forgiveness as they summon images of The Warriors and an evil Susanna Hoffs.
The text’s layout (down to the character sheet) plays with the same cold digital font used on alarm clocks, Doogie Howser, M. D. journal entries, and arcade games. As much as I wanted to hate this dominating font, I could not. It was the perfect fit to this book. Instead of the typical green or blue that ... [read full review]
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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This is a short work at only 14 pages, but with such a small price tag ($2.50) it has a high production value. The supplement looks clean and professionally done. However, my first impression upon reading it was that we have a product without a market. I am not sure how much the gaming community is crying out for a humanoid elk-person to play. More over, I am not sure how much we needed an American Indian derivative to play either. I appreciate the fullness of this supplement and the format is solid. The idea of introducing a new race, planting them in the generic “world,” giving them a physiological and psychological overview and combining that with player and DM tools is a great idea and something I would like to see more of. I take issue not with the concept, but with its execution in this particular case.
I feel as though we missed a great opportunity here, but it is instructive of the many possibilities 4E has to offer. Though this race may be a miss creatively, the idea is goo ... [read full review]
Rating: [3 of 5 Stars!] |
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A fun read that starts out with plenty of action in the first couple of pages. The artwork is definitely "classic" when compared to today's comics, but still a lot of fun.
"The Mystery of Psyche" is a great mini-tale and I'm looking forward to the conclusion in the next issue.
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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![Collection of Horrors [BUNDLE]](images/1/61520-thumb100.jpg "Collection of Horrors [BUNDLE]")
