Author name: Paco G. Jaen

Born in Spain with a talent for dyslexia, I am gamer, player, graphic designer, photographer and psycotherapist. Also online magazine publisher and writer. Yep.. I do lead a busy life!

Heroes of the Fallen Lands

D&D Essentials are a new product line designed for new players. It boils down some classes to a single new build (sometimes two) with the express interest of making the game easier for new players to get involved in 4th edition and to create a new baseline for players to build from. The Essentials line comes in three parts: the part for everyone, the part for Players and the part for the GM. The part for everyone includes the new Red Box, the Rules Compendium and the official dice set. The Players books are Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdom.

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Dominant Species

Once in a while, wargames publisher GMT decides to zig when everyone else zags, and prints a game that doesn’t fit their usual line-up. They did it years ago with titles like Winds of Plunder and Conquest of Paradise, and more recently with the cute Leaping Lemmings. This time around, GMT takes out the big guns: acclaimed wargame designer Chad Jensen (of Combat Commander fame), one of the biggest boxes and boards ever to roll off their assembly line, and a mammoth leap back in time to present us with Dominant Species, an evolutionary battle that’s roughly 90,000 years old. (Talk about a different breed of conflict simulation!)

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Aliens: This Time is War

My interest was first piqued when I came across the game on the Geek by accident. The creator is clearly a huge fan of the film(s), and after a peek at the rules file and some of the sample cards in the images section I took the plunge. When the cards arrived from ArtsCow I was pleasantly surprised. It was the first time I have used the service, and I was unsure what to expect in terms of quality. Each card is well printed, with only a few fuzzy edges, and all the information you need to use is clearly printed.

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Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade

Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade was a bit of a hard sell for me, being a quasi fantasy game in an oriental mish-mash fantasy culture with a heavy anime influence…that is kind of a laundry list of things I don’t like (except for the fantasy part). And yet, while I was reading (and loving) Apocalypse Prevention Inc., the book’s writer Eloy Lasanta asked me if I would be interested in checking out Wu Xing for a review…off the strength of the API series, I said yes.

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The Hobbit

The Hobbit is a light “roll and move” game with simple conditional ”success vs. failure” mechanics. There is very little player interaction to speak of, reducing the game to little more than a race to the finish line.

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Old-School Magic

Old School Magic by Charles Rice is a 29 page supplement for the Old School Reference and Index Compilation (OSRIC) which, for those of you not familiar with the OSR, is an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons retroclone originally written by Matthew Finch. Old School Magic expands on the OSRIC magic system by presenting a breakdown of magic levels from low to high, new ways of implementing spells, new magical archetypes, and new spells.

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The Art of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos

The Art of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos is a journey into the dark and haunting images inspired by the books and stories of the Cthulhu Mythos. Within its nearly 200 pages, some of today’s most talented artists give you a glimpse of the haunting and macabre images inspired by author H.P. Lovecraft. From the sanity-destroying Great Old Ones to the mad cultists who worship them, from the gangsters of the Roaring ’20s to the terrors of the 21st century, this book brings to life the dark and compelling images of the Cthulhu Mythos.

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Skull Mountain Review

Skull Mountain by Faster Monkey Games is a 36-page adventure module for the Labyrinth Lord Roleplaying Game. This is a review of the PDF I purchased from RPGNow. It uses a two-column, right-aligned layout with a clean, readable font. The font is fairly small, which means a lot of content is packed into its 36 pages. The writing is clear and the editing is good (I actually can’t recall any typos).

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Divine Foes

Divine Foes is a short PDF supplement for the Divinity system. The layout is a simple 2 column affair with a good sized font and no real art save for a background design on the pages themselves. The pages are designed to look old and faded, with a vaguely arcane symbol imprinted in the centre. While I like the virtual aging of the pages, I’m not a fan of the background image. While subtle, it draws my eyes away from the text and makes the PDF more challenging to read than it needs to be.

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Trail of Cthulhu

Lovecraft based games have been around for over two decades now. The first Role Playing Game came out in the 80’s and many editions of the game have graced our shelves ever since. From the initial percentile based based system that still stands, to the Monte Cook version of the game that attempted a D20 system conversion with not terribly good results and now, the Gumshoe System that rules Trail of Cthulhu, and it does it admirably.

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