Volo's Guide to Monsters

When this book was announced, I was hugely disappointed, on three counts. Firstly, I very much enjoyed the 5e "Monster Manual", and so the single supplement I was most hoping for was an MM2 of the same sort of size and quality. Instead, what was announced was a book that sounded like it was one-third a Monster Manual, which not only fell short by being full of other things I didn't want, but also meant that that MM2 is definitively not happening - it's just not in WotC's plans. Secondly, this book saw them adopt a higher price-point for 5e books - they'd already been right at the top-end of the scale at $50 for their 256-page adventures, but now they were charging $50 for 224 pages.

So I was all set to skip this book. Fortunately (?) though, Amazon had a very large discount available on the pre-order, and since I received some vouchers for my birthday it became a very easy buy. But that very much sets the tone for this review: this is an okay book, but very much non-essential, so the question is entirely one of determining at what point it represents value for money.

The book starts in the worst way possible: with a foreword written by "Volo" - a fairly annoying Forgotten Realms character who serves as a travel guide and lore-master - coupled with 'witty' annotations by Elminster. Such joy. Fortunately, the contribution of these characters after that introduction (which is, fortunately, a single page) amounts to a handful of notes in the text, and is therefore much less intrusive than I'd feared.

Thereafter, the book is split into three chapters.

Chapter One is about 100 pages of lore about nine iconic monster types: Beholders, Giants, Gnolls, Goblinoids, Hags, Kobolds, Mind Flayers, Orcs, and Yuan-ti. These are very similar in style to any of the Paizo "... Revisited" books or the old "Ecology of the..." articles from Dragon Magazine. These are all fine, so far as they go, except that too many of them seem to rely on "the gods made them this way" as an explanantion for why the monsters are as they are. Still, that's fine - the selection of monsters is decent, the amount of lore per monster is about right, and it's all fairly interesting. In fairness, I mostly prefer Paizo's take on most of these, but it's nice to have alternatives.

Chapter Two is very short, and provides some additional playable races for the game: Goliaths, Kenku, and a few others. The chapter also includes support for several monster-as-PC options for DMs who are so inclined. I was actually surprised by these: I had intended to ban all of them out of hand, but I found the new races sufficiently interesting that if a player came to me having read the book and wanted to play one of the new races then that would be fine (but not if they just wanted to play the stat-block). The monsters-as-PCs are not something I'd allow, though - I don't care for the concept, and the book notes they're not balanced anyway.

Chapter Three and the Appendices, then, amount to about 100 pages and provide new monsters for the game. Well, new to 5e that is - I don't think there are any genuinely new monsters here, which is no bad thing. The selection here is fine, with some odd choices (apparently, each designer was allowed to nominate one personal favourite for inclusion - which gives a nice weirdness to the book, and is a good thing). I was particularly glad to see personal favourites the Dark Ones and Chitine make the cut. Unfortunately, there are very few high-CR monsters here - it seems WotC once again have no meaningful intention to support high-level play. One of these days they should probably just drop levels 16+ (or even 10+) from the game.

One big criticism that I'll level at the monster chapter, and that I also levelled at "Tome of Beasts" is that the book doesn't have the table showing how the various traits affect monster building. Including such a table would have been a massive boon to a DM building his own monsters or building variants. It really should be a standard feature (or would be a really nice web enhancement).

And that's that.

So, a recommendation...

In some ways, this is really three books in one, as represented by the three chapters: monster lore, new PC races, new monsters. If all three of those appeal, this book is worth considering. If any one of the three does not appeal, you should probably skip this book unless you can get a huge discount. (Fortunately, the presence of Volo in the book is marginal, so shouldn't be a turn-off!)

Having said that, I don't think this book is worth buying at full price anyway. I got it at something like a 35% discount, and it feels like I paid about the right amount for what I got. Make of that what you will.

Better Player #4: How Much to Roleplay?

I've recently come across a near-perfect answer to the pesky question of how much a player should roleplay their character. That is, should the PC be considered as nothing more than a playing piece to be used to 'win' the game, should the PC basically be you in a fantasy universe, or should your PC be a whole other person with their own motivations, personality, and quirks?

The answer I came across is pretty simple: as much as you want.

That is, if you want to go full immersion, you should go for it. If you want to treat your character as just an extension as yourself, that's fine too.

There is one caveat to that, however, and it is this: don't be a jerk. If your character is an anti-social jerk who alienates everyone else in the group, that's on you - "I'm just playing my character" isn't a valid defence, because you chose to play that character rather than a myriad of others. (Likewise, if your character is resolutely determined not to get involved in adventures, that's your call - but it's not my responsibility to involve your character in events. Your choices are two-fold: play your character differently (or a different character), or don't play.)

And, yeah, there's a corollary to that: it can be a bit depressing for the DM to see players choose a non-human race for their character based purely on game stats, and then play that character as just a soulless playing piece to 'win' the game, but that's the player's prerogative. It's their character to roleplay as much, or as little, as they want. If it really bothers the DM, maybe the answer is to ban the use of non-human races... which may in turn lead to players choosing not to play.

Roleplaying After "Rogue One"

One thing that came out of viewing "Rogue One", that wasn't so much the case with "The Force Awakens", was that I was left with a burning desire to run some "Star Wars". More than that, though, I found myself particularly interested in dusting off the old d6 "Star Wars" RPG from West End Games, and giving that a whirl.

The use of the d6 system is probably key to this. One of the traps I think I'd fallen into was the thinking that "Star Wars" was basically all about the Jedi - probably due to the influence of the prequels, the "Clone Wars" series, and indeed "Star Wars Saga Edition". The old d6 system handles everything except the Jedi very well, with the Force being the one area where SWSE has it beat. (I discount the FFG version entirely, for the entirely arbitrary reason that it requires custom dice. That's one of my entirely irrational deal-breakers.)

Of course, this leads me to three or four key questions: will I actually do this? If so, will it be a campaign or one or more one-shots? And what will the PCs do? And, indeed, who will be the players?

In answer to those questions: probably not, if I'm honest; one-shots at least to start; see below; and dunno.

The most interesting of the questions concerns what the PCs will actually do. Where, initially at least, I'm quite attracted to the notion of them being an autonomous Rebel cell covering a fairly small area of space (but multiple star systems - maybe half a dozen inhabited locations?). Their mandate would be to disrupt the Imperial presence in the sector, disrupt operations, steal plans, and build a proper infrastructure for the Rebellion. Oh, and they'd inevitably have to deal with crime bosses, bounty hunters, and all the other figures on the fringe...

But, right now, it's all very nebulous - "Rogue One" left me keen to run the game, but didn't necessarily give me any insight in what exactly to do with it!

The Christmas Game That Never Was

I'm still hoping to run this year's Christmas Game, albeit not this year and not at Christmas. By which point I suppose it will just be "a game", but I digress. Anyway, that being the case, I'm not going to share many great spoilers here. However, there are a few things I can talk about.

Over the last several years, the Christmas Games have occurred in a version of the 'Verse set a long time after the events of "Serenity" - in fact, I've been advancing the timeline roughly in sync with the passage of real time. So, "Memoirs of a Companion" took place ten years after the film (in 2528 AD), and "Book, and His Cover" will be set in 2529. Though that's largely irrelevant - for the most part the characters are assumed to exist in a sort of comic-book stasis. The only major factor in that decision is that it means Wash and Book are dead and gone, and Zoe now has a daughter.

Anyway, "Book, and His Cover" was going to find our heroes right back where they started - on the raggedy edge, with Serenity falling apart, and picking up passengers on Persephone after a job went south. At least the heat is off, for the time being.

Enter a young man looking to book passage, who picks Serenity seemingly at random... and who later reveals that it was anything but. He claims to be the son of the departed Shepherd Book, and has come seeking Mal Reynolds looking for some answers.

And that's more or less as far as I'd got. Obviously, Shepherd Book was one of the more mysterious characters on the show, and I was inclined to dig into that a bit, especially in light of some of the material in "A Shepherd's Tale". But I hadn't quite decided just what Book's "son's" agenda was going to be...

(The key, I think, was probably to mix in just enough truth with the various lies that get told in amongst it all. In particular, I was strongly leaning towards the young man actually being Book's son, rather than that being the very first lie. Plus, I was going to suggest that that character be one of the PCs for the session, which in turn suggests he shouldn't be entirely in control of all the agendas...)

Departing ENWorld

After something like fifteen years, I've finally decided to step away from ENWorld. Part of that is that the site has become increasingly less useful with the release of 5th edition - there are so few releases that there's little incentive to visit for an update on news. But, mostly, it's due to the character of the place.

Unfortunately, one of the consequences of the Edition Wars seems to be the formation of two armed camps - the pro-D&D and pro-Pathfinder groups. And although open hostilities seem to be a thing of the past, the tensions have never gone away. In particular, it seems that you are indeed allowed to criticise one of the games... but only if you're already part of the tribe. For the rest, even the mildest criticism can be met with vitriol. Which is pretty hellish if your opinion of 5e is "yeah, it's good... but..."

But the biggest problem is not the character of the place, but rather my character at the place. It really started to seem that all I was doing there was engaging in pointless, increasingly bad-tempered arguments over minutae...

The bottom line is that I've decided to step away, probably permanently. I've come to not particularly enjoy being part of that community, and I've really come to dislike the part of myself that that community brings out.

It's a shame, and the end of an era... but I think it's also a positive move.

N.E.W. Science Fiction Role-playing Game

In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why I backed the Kickstarter for this game. Amongst other things, the offer of a 'crunchy' new roleplaying system (when my tastes are leaning towards the more free-form) and a generic sci-fi game (which generic sci-fi has never exactly inspired, and when Firefly was more than hitting the spot), should by rights have dissuaded me.

Still, back it I did, and so eighteen months later I received my shiny new hardback book - 280ish pages of glorious full-colour. The only thing I'd say about that is that the text size is pretty big, meaning that those same 280 pages are perhaps closer to 200 in an equivalent D&D 5e/Pathfinder book (if there was such a thing).

The book is well-written and easily digestible. The system it presents is actually not as complex as the pitch had made out - while it is indeed 'crunchy', that doesn't mean 'complex'. Rather, it means that things have stats, and the group are expected to care about those stats. But I daresay you could quite happily play this game in a very freeform manner and be quite happy.

But the big weakness of the game, and also its great strength, is that this does indeed try to be a generic sci-fi game - there are elements here that are clearly nods to Star Trek and Star Wars, Doctor Who, and references to many other novels and TV shows. This means it's trying to cover an awful lot of material, and it means it does so very briefly.

And in that respect, this game reminded me more than anything else of "d20 Modern" - it's less a game in its own right than a toolkit for a game. This means that for a GM willing to put in quite a lot of work (or, indeed, if a third-party supplement is available), it can do an awful lot for you. But for the time-stretched GM it's of less use.

That means that any recommendation is necessarily conditional: if you have something in mind (and, especially, something that hasn't been otherwise covered by a dedicated game), and are willing to put the work in, then this is a good candidate to consider. And if, as the publisher hopes, this game sees lots of third-party support, it's utility will improve with time. But absent that support, and absent the time to do the work yourself (or, indeed, absent a clear idea of what to do with the game, rather than just "let's give it a go"), this is one to miss.