Timewaster's Guide Archive

Why don't we just go back ADD and use 2nd ed books with it.

-=Oh the nostalgia is thick now=-

Because if you reallllllly want nostalgia you'll bring back the old red box instead. In which case I call dibs on playing the Dwarf.

My daughter liked Mr Klutz is Nuts (about a principal that goes to extreme ends to get the kids to do their homework) and she reads the various disney short story anthologies regularly.

For those of you not familiar with XCrawl, it is beer and pretzels D&D, dungeon crawling as a professional sport. My group has had regular side events using it over the years and it's been mindless fun.

One of my players is starting up a 4E crawl and between he and I we think we've got most of the bases covered (Fame, Mojo - team bonuses basically, and campaign backdrop), but I'm curious if anyone here has tried using the new edition for XCrawl.

Since the 80s were the golden age of one hit wonders, I look to them for my choice.

I was going to go with Dead Or Alive, but since he's a TWO hit wonder (Right Round and Brand New Lover) he doesn't count. With that in mind, I'm going to go with Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax

I've always preferred screen monkey over openRpg, but that's just my preference. OpenRPG is fine too, though

Oooooh shiny. Thanks for the tip. I'll pass this one onto my group.

My original group was good about it. Mainly because they knew I wasn't going to completely hose them over a few bad die rolls. We have new players, one that does the "roll the dice in his lap" move. It's annoying, but not worth slowing the game down.

First things first, I'm going to begin by giving Palladium books some credit. I liked Beyond the Supernatural. I wouldn't call it horror, more supernatural thriller. I liked TMNT and Robotech and RIFTS for their camp. I have fond memories of Heroes Unlimited. Sure I've since found games that play those genres better, but that doesn't change the fact that the times spent playing those games was fun.

I had a small handful of issues/questions/points on the review:

Two thoughts ran through my head when I heard that Palladium was doing a zombie game. The first was “awesome!” Palladium is one of my favorite publishers, putting out great action/adventure RPGs with a nearly endless supply of cool stories and ideas. They also tend to specialize in horror and its subgenres, with games like Nightbane, Rifts, Splicers, and Beyond the Supernatural, which is hands down my favorite horror game from any publisher. With that kind of pedigree, how could they not make an incredible zombie apocalypse game?

Palladium doesn't specialize in horror. It never has.  It has never released a horror game. If this is a horror game, it will be their first. As I said above, BtS was a Supernatural Thriller game, not horror. When your characters can lob fireballs and explosives at the monsters coming up from below and win, you fail the horror test.

Calling Nightbane a "Horror" game is like saying that Scary Movie is a "Dark, chilling thriller". Your characters were spike-covered-arse-kicking monstrosities.  RIFTS has mecha mammoths, hand held railguns, and cyborg cats. It fails the horror test so many ways they can not be counted. A game needs more than vampires as a monster (or playable race for that matter) to be called "horror". CoC? Horror. All Flesh Must Be Eaten? Horror. RIFTS? Not horror.

Removing the vast suite of super powers typical to most RPGs, and substituting it with an excellent career system adapted from Beyond the Supernatural, forces you to think about who your character really is, not just what he or she can do.

The vast suite of super powers is something that Palladium does in virtually every game it produces. So throwing stones at everyone else when your house is made of very brittle glass may not be the best way forward. 

A significant portion of the book is taken up by the zombies themselves—not just the stats for an individual zombie, though those are certainly present, but for the threats and possibilities of the zombie horde as a whole. The true threat of Dead Reign comes not from one zombie, but from the mounting threat of thousands of zombies slowly converging on you. Combat is quick and brutal, because the only other option is long and more brutal, and if you hang around too long you WILL get overwhelmed.

Palladium's combat system is never quick. All Flesh Must Be Eaten is quick. CoC is quick ("You're mad! New character!"). Palladium has two forms of HP and characters can have between 1 and 6 attacks a round at 1st level depending on what version of their combat they decided to print with this book. Unless they trimmed things back in some way, hordes of zombies will become battles that take hours.

I like that it sounds like they stripped down the gear list, so hopefully assault weapons will no longer be readily available. The fact that they were kind enough to leave out psionics and magic (you specifically said magic, I'm assuming that meant both....I'm hoping that meant both) is a plus sign for it.

What I'm wondering about with the inclusion of feeding on PPE is if this doesn't foreshadow the inclusion of some form of magic in future supplements.