Re: [HOE] I hate the Book o' the Dead

[Robert Holland <robert@macauley.com>]

Geez, it never seemed that bad to me. What powers in particular struck you as
most overpowered?

--Robert Holland

>OK, that might be a little strong, but I really don't like it.
>This being PEGs first sourcebook, it seems to me that they made a lot of
>mistakes that were corrected in later books.  most of this stems from who
>they chose to write it.  If you ever have the choice between reading a
>book by Lester Smith and swallowing razor blades, take the latter option;
>it'll be far less cruel.  Soon after buying the Book, I hunted down Mr.
>Lester at GenCon, seeking an autograph and some insight into his take on
>Deadlands.  The man could barely remember writing BotD, and didn't seem
>to have read the main rulebook all the way through.  And it shows, with
>how well-balanced and complete the harrowed rules are.
>In that entire book, there are about ten powers or less that are so
>phenomenally far above the rest in power level that I've rarely seen
>anyone use anything else.  Of those ten, I think PEG has had to issue
>official errata on 7 of them.  A lot of the other powers don't even make
>sense, and I suspect that the only reason PEG hasn't had to issue errata
>on them is that no one's ever used them in a game, and therefore had to
>ask about them.  Harrowed, with respect to other arcane characters, have
>a degree of power imbalance that most gamers haven't seen since they quit
>playing Rifts.  With the rules in Book o' the Dead, it's almost
>impossible for a character to ever lose enough Dominion for the manitou
>to be a threat.
>The rules that have been polished, cleaned, and mostly re-written were
>reproduced in Cyborgs.  The powers listed in Cyborgs are probably the
>only decent ones out of BotD, also cleaned and polished.  The ones that
>were left out are either horribly unbalanced, incomprehensible, totally
>useless or, in some cases, all three.
>BotD does have some information on what it's like to be harrowed, and
>what that experience is like for the corpse.  But you can get almost the
>same exact feel from readin Wraith, which at this point, you should be
>able to pick up for about seven bucks (BTW, when I get to the point of
>reccommending a White Wolf book over a PEG book, you know I'm serious).
>
From Whom It May Concern,
>Rich Ranallo
>
>"There will be no Year 2000.  At least, not as we know it."
>-Hunter S. Thompson
>
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