Re: [HOE]How are the new books

[Darrin Bright <darrin@neobright.net>]

Grand Master Nilus of the Dark Angel Chapter wrote:
 
> Hey all you people lucky enough to go to Origins(I had to pick between
> Origins and Gencon and I picked Gencon[I live in chicago so its a lot
> closer])  ANyways did any of you pickup Shattercoast and/or Epitath 2? I was
> wondering how they were?

I didn't really look at Shattered Coast, but I did pick up Epitaph 2,
which was pretty decent. I'd like to see more Epitaphs. The new guns
(for the Confederacy) were very nice. The other stuff I remember
concerned the adventure (Biodome) and the comic in the back.

[SPOILERS - MARSHALLS ONLY!]

















[I SAID MARSHALLS ONLY, TINHORN!]










Biodome looked like an interesting adventure, but despite a strong
premise and some wonderful ideas, I wasn't very happy with the
execution. To get *to* the Biodome, the PCs have to wade through
literally an army of walkin' dead, and there is no attempt to make this
endeavor worthwhile, the PCs can break off and hightail it away, and in
fact would be seriously advised to do so if they had any common sense.
There's just no compelling reason given to the PCs to wade through that
many zombies. 

Once inside the Biodome, the set-up is kind of interesting with the
different ecologies, but nothing interesting was done with them, and
there's no reason the PCs have to explore them at all, really. All the
important stuff is in the Secret Basement Lab. Any PC who has ever
played any horror RPG already *knows* all the cool stuff is in the
basement and will probably rush there at the first opportunity. My main
concern would be an experienced party "guessing" how the adventure is
set up beforehand and taking shortcuts that could frustrate a GM that
isn't on his toes. Drugging the PCs and giving them long odds on the
saving throw is a big part of the plot, but fortunately railroading the
PCs this way isn't exactly required, and the adventure does address what
happens if most of the PCs manage to stay awake. The rest of the
adventure is a poor excluse for an insane amount of combat with walkin'
dead, which I guess is to expected in a HOE game, but the adventure
seemed designed as unnecessarily hard for no good reason, especially
since the rewards/payoff for the adventure is lame to nonexistant.

And this bothered me... there's no real way to "win" this adventure for
the PCs, other than to just survive. There's no real point to go to this
biodome, and it's almost *IMPOSSIBLE* to get anything worthwhile out of
this adventure. The only way you can really "win" as far as I can tell
is to grab a bunch of sacks of the "super-grow grain", but this is only
mentioned in passing ONCE at the end, and it's never mentioned anywhere
in the adventure where this grain is or how the PCs would conceivably
take enough of it to feed the nearby communities. Unless some heavy
hints were dropped by the GM, I can't imagine any party would even
*think* of grabbing a bunch of grain. If it does occur to anybody, and
they do manage to get enough of it past the army of walkin' dead, the
adventure is especially vague on why they should be rewarded for this,
since everything that comes out of this Biodome place is tainted and
gradually turns people into faminites. Why would the PCs be rewarded for
turning townsfolk into faminites? And really, how is one sack of grain
going to feed a whole town that is currently starving? Okay, so maybe
the PCs are smart enough to grab a sack of grain... whoop de do, a loaf
of bread will feed a few people for one day.

Anyway, you may get the impression that I hated Biodome, but that's not
entirely true. The adventure as-written has a lot of problems, but there
were some good ideas in there. I'm looking forward to putting this
Biodome thing in a campaign and coming up with my own reasons on why the
PCs have to go there, and what they might want to bring back. So there
are some good ideas in there that I do want to use... execution was just
poor, but I can fix that with some work of my own.


And finally, the comic... [This is still SPOILERS, so skip it if you
haven't read it! MAJOR SPOILERS, Okay?]

















It was awfully choppy, I don't know of PEG was short on space but I
found the cuts between the action hard to follow. Oh, and something
Shane pointed out... Roth has a small flashback scene where Teller dies,
but Teller now has brown hair and a beard, which apparently isn't what
Teller looks like. Shane said Roth wasn't remembering Teller correctly,
and Teller should look like he always did. 

And for those of you that were wondering what that weird ghost-thing was
doing hanging around the campfire at the end, that's supposed to be
Teller's spirit, watching over his companions.