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Post by moviedave on Jan 27, 2009 10:40:53 GMT -5
New Species. New Talents. New Feats. New Force Powers/Talents/Secrets. No real surprises with that stuff. Not crazy about the force talent to phase through walls, but there it is. Mostly just new options.
Followers are kind of neat. That's new for Star Wars.
New Equipment. Shadowsuits are back. I forget who liked those.
New Droids. Finally, Stats for the Midwife Droid. I can resume the campaign now.
Starships round out the Player Section at about 80 pages.
125+ pages of GM Stuff. The weird thing about this stuff is just the Droids, Equipment, Starships etc. that are scattershoted throughout. I think we commented on this before, but it would really be easier to have all the starships under Starship, not also in The Jedi, The Republic, The Confederacy, Fringe Factions etc.
Lot of great stuff in here. Not sure how the play balance is. This RPG needs a rules compendium already and the system is less than 2 years old. Not to mention Vehicles, Equipment, Droids, Feats, Talents, etc., etc., etc.
Oh well, one more retrain for all you aspiring players out there. Kyra has a few new things to look at I believe.
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Post by Derek Raines on Jan 27, 2009 11:30:22 GMT -5
Powergamers rejoice. A new layer of meat and cheese for your Munchkin Dagwood!
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Post by gamedave on Jan 29, 2009 14:19:09 GMT -5
Got my copy yesterday. UPS guy left it on my front steps. In the rain. Fortunately, it didn't rain very much yesterday, so while the box was soaked, the book was dry, and had only minor warping on the pages from the humidity.
Kyra now has a choice of two prestige classes: sabateur (Scum and Villainy) and military engineer. Haven't had a chance to really look at much else yet.
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Post by gamedave on Feb 8, 2009 14:01:26 GMT -5
So, I finally got around to taking a look at the Clone Wars Campaign Guide today. It's mostly based on the current Cartoon Network CGI Clone Wars series, but it also draws quite a bit from the crap movies and the earlier Cartoon Network "minisodes."
As usual, we start with a species chapter, detailing nine new species, including the Kaleesh (General Grievous' species) and the Kaminoans.
Next come a chapter on Heroic Traits, introducing new talents and talent trees, new uses for skills, new feats, and rules for followers. The most noteworthy addition, other than followers, is the noble's Collaborator Talent Tree. This really seems like a board/card/mini game mechanic jammed into a role-playing game. Basically, the various Talents enable a Noble to temporarily fool opponents into thinking he or she is actually a double agent. The noble gets Talents that can negate attacks, gain the same insight and morale bonuses that opponents receive, protect allies from attack, and so on. It just seems really odd to handle infiltration of an enemy organization as a game mechanic that gives round-to-round tactical advantage, rather than with, you know, role-playing.
The follower mechanic is the most noteworthy addition to the rules. Nobles, soldiers, and scouts can now gain followers and give them additional abilities through further Talents. Similar to the 4E's beastmaster ranger, characters share actions with their followers, a fairly effective game mechanic that makes handling companions fairly easy. The fact that only nobles, soldiers, and scouts get followers, though, seems a bit odd. Nobles, check. If anyone should be able to attract followers, it is the noble. Soldiers, fine. You can play a squad leader, and soldiers already have some leader-like talents. But the scout? If everyone gets followers, this makes sense, but how do scouts get followers, and not scoundrels? What scoundrels can't lead a gang of thieves or a crew of smugglers? And jedi not getting a squad of followers makes sense, but this seems like the perfect game mechanic to give them a padawan.
The next chapter gives new talent trees for some prestige classes, and three new prestige classes, the droid commander (apparently, only useful for NPC droids), the military engineer (yay! another prestige class for Kyra!), and the vanguard, a sort of prestige military scout.
The Force chapter gives several new powers, talents, techniques, secrets, and three new force traditions. With the addition of the Cloak power and the Improved Cloak Talent (as well as the reappearance of the shadowsuit in the next chapter), I think Jeff can now recreate a very close approximation of Zia from the previous d20 edition.
With the equipment and droids and starships chapters, we get a bunch of new weapons, equipment, droids, and starships. There's nothing really innovative here, but there is a ton of new stuff.
The campaign chapter gives some useful information and guidelines for running a campaign during the Clone Wars era, and also introduces a mass combat system to SWSE. WotC has basically stolen my idea from my D&D 3.5 campaign of treating units as single creatures, with stats based on the average stats of the individuals in the unit. It also includes rules for including heroic characters (like the PCs) as members of the unit. This looks like a pretty useful mechanic for gaming out large-scale battles, while keeping the PCs actively involved.
This chapter also includes separate, but similar, rules for squad units, to allow the GM to aggregate 3-4 low-threat opponents into a single higher-threat opponent to take on the PCs. Although the rules don't specifically allow for it, it also seems like a useful mechanic for PCs who have the maximum of three followers. This is a pretty good idea (based on the swarm rules from SWSE and D&D 4E), which enables the GM to better handle large numbers of opponents - it really seems like a great idea to allow PCs to carve through swathes of battle droids or storm troopers.
We also get the first random rules placement in this chapter, with a new weapon-type, the weapon emplacement (yes, these are likely to be used in a mass combat situation, but why aren't they in the weapons section of the equipment and droids chapter?).
Next up is a gazetteer chapter, with several new systems, and updates to several others, detailing their situations in the Clone Wars era.
The final 100 or so pages of the book (almost half its length) is devoted to chapters on the Jedi, the Republic, the Confederacy (aka the Separatists), and Fringe Factions. Each chapter gives information on the organization and structure of the factions, prominent members, and, in the grand tradition of SWSE, new weapons, equipment, droids, vehicles, and starships.
After the high point of Scum and Villainy, where all the new rules and items were actually in their own chapter, we are now back to SWSE's Scattershot (tm) approach. At least the new stuff is well-organized within each chapter. And hey, an index! Well, sort of. It does list new characters and creatures, droids, vehicles and starships, and weapon emplacements alphabetically by CR with page references. If only there were a centralized list like this for the whole SWSE system.
As usual for SWSE, this book is packed with information in a clearly written and well-organized (with the massive exception that equipment, droids, and vehicles are split between 5 different chapters) format. Obviously, for any Clone Wars-era campaign, this is a great resource for players, but even more so for GMs. Even outside of the Clone Wars era, the rules for followers, squads, and mass combat are a great addition to SWSE. Overall, a good buy for SWSE players, and an even better one for GMs. Given that the followers, squads, and mass combat rules could be adapted for other d20 products, this might even be a good buy for someone running a D&D 4E campaign.
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