Brant Guillory 20 March 2015

Rules?  Meh.  Sourcebook?  w00t!

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First, a confession: I don’t play the Hero system. I’ve never played the Hero system. I don’t foresee myself ever playing the Hero system. Yet, this book has one of the most prominent places in my gaming library, and would probably be in the top 5-10 gaming items I would recommend for the any new player, and in the top 3-5 for any new GM.

Why? The back half of this book is one of the best sourcebooks I’ve ever seen.

I’ve been role-playing since 1981. I’ve been collecting since about 1983. I have yet to see a better overall sourcebook than the one included in Fantasy Hero.

I bought the game without knowing you needed the Hero system to play (yes, I missed the big warning on the back cover) but that didn’t stop me from using it over and over.

And over.

From pages 100 to 202, the book tackles, in order: creating scenarios, running scenarios, fantasy genres and their conventions, setting up campaigns, and worldbuilding. That’s just the game-mastering section. The Sourcebook offers sample character archetypes, a sample campaign described in simple but sufficient detail to play, two extended scenarios, 5 mini-scenarios, and two of best sections I’ve ever seen on designing monsters and magic items. Oh, and the last 50 pages of the book (202-252) are one of the best collections of spell-books I’ve seen in years.

The section on creating scenarios leads right in to how to run them, and the brief advice is exactly what you’d want in “Everything I Need to Know About GMing I Learned in Kindergarten.” Individualizing the NPCs; Cinematic fight scenes; Pacing, Climax & Rewards; Foreshadowing; and Cash Flow are all addressed in ways that beginners can easily grasp and veterans will love to be reminded of. Continue reading →

Brant Guillory, 20 February 2015

Outstanding “transition” from dungeon-crawl to explorer and a great campaign starter, if you can find it ~ it’s out of print

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How many of us have ever embarked on a great fantasy epic and the characters were dead in 20 minutes because we were building our new characters and bit off more than we could chew? How often has the DM/GM been forced to tie together a bunch of trite dungeon crawls together just to have enough of a campaign for the 2nd level characters to wander through? Ever wish you could get those low-level characters out of the “cheese maze” and into the world without getting them quashed in the second encounter?

Have I got a deal for you…

You’ll have to search the out-of-print bins, but this one is well worth the quest.

B10 – Night’s Dark Terror, was written for the original D&D line as the “transition” module from the basic rules (levels 1-3) to the expert rules (levels 4-9). You only need the basic rules to play, but most gamers had ’em all anyway.

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