The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Let me start off by saying that I received this book in the mail from the fine folk at Dynasty Presentations.

Dark Conspiracy is a game set in the near future when the excesses of capitalism have borne fruit. But that isn't the worst news. The worse news is that this situation has been caused by an evil that has been awakened and its allies from dark dimensions. Your job is to turn the tide.

Attributes: 7 attributes, STR, CON, AGL, INT, EDU(cation), CHR (human range of 1-10) and Empathy with two methods of attribute rolling. Point allocation of 36 points (with Empathy costing 2 points to increase by 1, all others on a one to one ratio) and Random (2d6-2 for all attributes except Empathy which is 1d10-5) where you have a minimum of at least 33 points.

Mechanics: The basic mechanic to determine success at an action is rolling a d20 and trying to roll under ( B * appropiate attribute + skill rating (if you have the skill in question)) where B is (4,2,1,0.5,0.25) which corrseponds to the difficulty of the task (Easy, Average, Difficult, Formidable and Impossible respectively). If you roll +/- 10 more/less than the target number, you score an outstanding failure/success.

Highlights of the player's book

The Good - The book is a 6" x 9" book and coming in at 400 pages, there is a lot of information. Apparently, this book includes the 1st ed books Dark Tek and Empathic Sourcebook so you're getting your money's worth.

- Character creation. I like the method of creating characters with one slight caveat. Character creation is based on 4 year terms. Each term nets you certain skills, skill points, money and contacts. Game masters should simply determine how many terms individuals should have instead of allowing random determination of the number of 4 year terms.

- Contacts The actual explanation and rules about contacts are one of the better ones I have seen. A lot of other games I've read have basically glossed over the use of contacts and their actual in-game use.

The Bad. - Secondary Activities. During each term, you are allowed to pick up secondary activites. Some secondary activities allow increases in attributes and others allow increase in skills. The problem is that some of them should be worth more than others (the attribute increasing skills in my opinion) which directly leads into the 2nd bad problem

- Damage. The real dog of the system. The system is a hit point system with different body parts having a different number of hit points called hit capacity (HC). Damage is divided into scratch, slight, serious and critical (> 1/2 HC, (0.5-1)*HC, (1-2)*HC, <2*HC respectively) with each having their own modifiers to you STR, CON and initative ratings. There are no bleeding rules. I'll focus on the head (HPs equal to your CON rating) and chest (equal to STR+(CON * 2)). Now the problem is that a normal human would have for Head, 5 HPs and for their chest, 15. Most handguns only do 1d6 or 2db damge with rifles doing between 3-5d6. You're dead only if you are critically wounded. If it is your head, it is intanst death and for other body parts, you have a window of 10 minutes before the character is dead. Now, this means that a normal human could take a lot of shots to the chest and head from a handgun. However, it gets worse. Remember what I said about before about secondary activites increasing your attributes? Guess what two attributes can be increased. If you guessed STR and CON, you won a prize. With the point allocation system, it is very easy to end up with two scoes of 10 in these respective attributes. This means that a human could take up to 20 pts of damage to their head before they are killed and 60!!! pts of damage to their chest before there is the _chance_ they might die. Let's not even talk about what happens if you have armour (Might as well carry around a bazooka).

- Career portraits For the four year terms, one takes a career. Each career has certain requirements. Ther are approximately 50 careers listed and almost all have a B&W mugshot. My question is why? The majority aren't exotic careers and the use of the pictures was a total waste.

- Resolving damage from firearms. Geez, the rules for firearms are needlessly complicated IMHO. It doesn't help that firing in automatic mode is listed as an Impossible task either. There are rules for small arm firearms, different rules for automatic fire and different rules for shotguns. I had a lot of trouble keeping straight the different rules for firearms.

- Campaign Setting Lack of background material on the world of Dark Conspiracy. There must be less than 3 pages of material on the world. Frankly, this is the biggest disappointment. I had no clue as to why on the cover, there is a vintage 50s car yet the people are wielding high-powered rifles. There are 100 pages used for equipment tables and I would have preferred if they lost half these pages and used it for background.

The Ugly - Rules for Explosives and other sources Square roots. Nuff said. The rules for othr sources of damage aren't anything to write home about.

The Undecided - Empathy Unlike the basic mechanic where you roll against the appropiate target number based on the difficulty of the task, with empathy, the GM rolls the die and depending on the number rolled, you get a STAGE success where each stage correlates to the basic mechanics. Each empathy skill has under its listing, effects for the various stages. Thus, if you want to say use the psionic skill Clairvoyance, the DM rolls the die and you won't know if you got the necessary stage success until you try to use that stage. There are 4 broad empathy skills, neuropath, sorcery, mysticism abd psionics. Each broad skill has its own set of specific skills. While I like sorcery which involves the use of manipulating dimensions, the other broad skills don't do much for me. The actual mechanics also I could only judge through running a campaign.

In conclusion, I can't really recommend the Player's handbook since the rules basically suck and there really isn't a setting per se.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Dark Conspiracy: Player's Handbook 2nd Edition, Master's Edition
Author: Lester W. Smith Category: game Company/Publisher: Dynasty Presentations, Inc. Line: Dark Conspiracy Cost: 25.00 Page count: 400 ISBN: 1-892886-00-6 SKU: DPI 1000 Capsule Review by Allister Huggins on 11/20/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Science_fiction Modern_day Horror Conspiracy Vampire	Let me start off by saying that I received this book in the mail from the fine folk at Dynasty Presentations. Dark Conspiracy is a game set in the near future when the excesses of capitalism have borne fruit. But that isn't the worst news. The worse news is that this situation has been caused by an evil that has been awakened and its allies from dark dimensions. Your job is to turn the tide. Attributes: 7 attributes, STR, CON, AGL, INT, EDU(cation), CHR (human range of 1-10) and Empathy with two methods of attribute rolling. Point allocation of 36 points (with Empathy costing 2 points to increase by 1, all others on a one to one ratio) and Random (2d6-2 for all attributes except Empathy which is 1d10-5) where you have a minimum of at least 33 points. Mechanics: The basic mechanic to determine success at an action is rolling a d20 and trying to roll under ( B * appropiate attribute + skill rating (if you have the skill in question)) where B is (4,2,1,0.5,0.25) which corrseponds to the difficulty of the task (Easy, Average, Difficult, Formidable and Impossible respectively). If you roll +/- 10 more/less than the target number, you score an outstanding failure/success. Highlights of the player's book The Good - The book is a 6" x 9" book and coming in at 400 pages, there is a lot of information. Apparently, this book includes the 1st ed books Dark Tek and Empathic Sourcebook so you're getting your money's worth. - Character creation. I like the method of creating characters with one slight caveat. Character creation is based on 4 year terms. Each term nets you certain skills, skill points, money and contacts. Game masters should simply determine how many terms individuals should have instead of allowing random determination of the number of 4 year terms. - Contacts The actual explanation and rules about contacts are one of the better ones I have seen. A lot of other games I've read have basically glossed over the use of contacts and their actual in-game use. The Bad. - Secondary Activities. During each term, you are allowed to pick up secondary activites. Some secondary activities allow increases in attributes and others allow increase in skills. The problem is that some of them should be worth more than others (the attribute increasing skills in my opinion) which directly leads into the 2nd bad problem - Damage. The real dog of the system. The system is a hit point system with different body parts having a different number of hit points called hit capacity (HC). Damage is divided into scratch, slight, serious and critical (> 1/2 HC, (0.5-1)HC, (1-2)HC, <2HC respectively) with each having their own modifiers to you STR, CON and initative ratings. There are no bleeding rules. I'll focus on the head (HPs equal to your CON rating) and chest (equal to STR+(CON 2)). Now the problem is that a normal human would have for Head, 5 HPs and for their chest, 15. Most handguns only do 1d6 or 2db damge with rifles doing between 3-5d6. You're dead only if you are critically wounded. If it is your head, it is intanst death and for other body parts, you have a window of 10 minutes before the character is dead. Now, this means that a normal human could take a lot of shots to the chest and head from a handgun. However, it gets worse. Remember what I said about before about secondary activites increasing your attributes? Guess what two attributes can be increased. If you guessed STR and CON, you won a prize. With the point allocation system, it is very easy to end up with two scoes of 10 in these respective attributes. This means that a human could take up to 20 pts of damage to their head before they are killed and 60!!! pts of damage to their chest before there is the _chance_ they might die. Let's not even talk about what happens if you have armour (Might as well carry around a bazooka). - Career portraits For the four year terms, one takes a career. Each career has certain requirements. Ther are approximately 50 careers listed and almost all have a B&W mugshot. My question is why? The majority aren't exotic careers and the use of the pictures was a total waste. - Resolving damage from firearms. Geez, the rules for firearms are needlessly complicated IMHO. It doesn't help that firing in automatic mode is listed as an Impossible task either. There are rules for small arm firearms, different rules for automatic fire and different rules for shotguns. I had a lot of trouble keeping straight the different rules for firearms. - Campaign Setting Lack of background material on the world of Dark Conspiracy. There must be less than 3 pages of material on the world. Frankly, this is the biggest disappointment. I had no clue as to why on the cover, there is a vintage 50s car yet the people are wielding high-powered rifles. There are 100 pages used for equipment tables and I would have preferred if they lost half these pages and used it for background. The Ugly - Rules for Explosives and other sources Square roots. Nuff said. The rules for othr sources of damage aren't anything to write home about. The Undecided - Empathy Unlike the basic mechanic where you roll against the appropiate target number based on the difficulty of the task, with empathy, the GM rolls the die and depending on the number rolled, you get a STAGE success where each stage correlates to the basic mechanics. Each empathy skill has under its listing, effects for the various stages. Thus, if you want to say use the psionic skill Clairvoyance, the DM rolls the die and you won't know if you got the necessary stage success until you try to use that stage. There are 4 broad empathy skills, neuropath, sorcery, mysticism abd psionics. Each broad skill has its own set of specific skills. While I like sorcery which involves the use of manipulating dimensions, the other broad skills don't do much for me. The actual mechanics also I could only judge through running a campaign. In conclusion, I can't really recommend the Player's handbook since the rules basically suck and there really isn't a setting per se. Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Dark Conspiracy: Player's Handbook 2nd Edition, Master's Edition