[Editor's note: Obviously, the word count of 17 is incorrect for this review. In fact, this review is so lengthy (13,400 words), it couldn't fit in the online submission form. Enjoy! - Allan]

This is a play test review. I bought a copy of White Wolf's Adventure! back in August and have been running a weekly game using the system ever since. There have been two distinct campaigns, with some overlap among the players. The first campaign broke up when two of the players left to go overseas and a third took the opportunity to drop out as he wasn't enjoying the game. The second campaign was made up of the surviving players along with some new recruits. The second campaign is on-going.

Overall, there have been seven players involved in the game. All male, ranging in age from 16 to 40.

The game is taking a break over the holidays and I've decided to take the opportunity of the dog days between 25th December and 1st January to organise the various notes I've made concerning the game over the past four months into a coherent review.

Disclaimer

Towards the end of October 2000 I was banned from the AeonAdventure mailing list at Yahoo Groups for disagreeing with Bruce Baugh's (the game's developer) contention that fans of Adventure! constitute some sort of elite.

For what it's worth I still disagree with the contention. I don't think people who like Adventure! are any better (or worse) than those who don't or those who have no opinion one way or the other.

I mention this so that those who disagree with anything I've written below will have a readily available straw man to use when dismissing my comments. All part of the service.

Some Background

As the back cover helpfully informs us (in big, red letters), Adventure! is "THE STORYTELLING GAME OF PULP ACTION!" Given that, I thought some background information on the pulps would be useful.

The pulps were a type of magazine that flourished between 1900 and 1950 (though they existed before and after those dates), with a peak in terms of sales and general acceptability in the 1920s. The magazines were 10 x 7 inches, slightly smaller than the more respectable slicks (magazines printed on glossy paper) which were 8.5 x 11.5 inches. They had brightly coloured covers and black and white interiors, printed on the cheapest pulp paper available.

Pulp magazines featured fiction. All genres were represented: there were pulps devoted to romance, westerns, science fiction, sports, crime and mystery, sea stories, Foreign Legion stories, aviator stores -- even such esoteric subjects as Zeppelin Stories or Underworld Romance. There were even slightly salacious pulps, generally identified by the word Spicy in their titles, as in Spicy Mystery or Spicy Western (modern readers will find the erotic allusions in these stories pretty mild by current standards). In many ways, pulps were the television of their time; generally the material was lowest common denominator, but there were flashes of brilliance and some idiosyncratic visions. The pulps were where such popular culture characters as Conan the Barbarian, young Doctor Kildare and Zorro first appeared.

Starting in 1931, with the first issue of The Shadow Magazine, the pulps developed a particular genre that came to be known as the Hero or Character pulps. These were built around larger-than-life heroes (or, occasionally, villains) such as The Shadow, Doc Savage, the Spider, Operator #5 ("America's Secret Service Ace") and featured fantastic villains, bizarre crimes and incredible adventures. Each issue of a character pulp would feature a lead novel about the title character (generally between 40,000 and 50,000 words) along with various back-up stories, articles and other features.

Many of the lead novels from the character pulps have been reprinted as paperbacks, starting in 1964 when Bantam Books published The Man of Bronze, the first of their Doc Savage reprints. There have been paperback editions of The Shadow, Operator #5, G-8 and his Battle Aces, the Spider, the Avenger and others.

Fans of the character pulps tend to be more enthusiastic and vocal than those who enjoy other genres. As a consequence, unless otherwise qualified, the term "Pulp" has come to be synonymous with "character pulp", just as the term "comic" has come to be synonymous with "super-hero comic" despite the fact that almost every genre (romance, western, crime, funny animals) have been represented in comic books at one time or another.

It is in this narrower sense of "Pulp" -- adventure stories about larger-than-life heroes generally set in the 1930s -- that the term is used when applied to more recent material such as the Prince Zarkon stories by Lin Carter, Buckaroo Banzai, Indiana Jones and the recent Mummy movies.

It is also in this narrow sense that Adventure! uses the term. To quote from the back cover: "Adventure is a game of pulp action, where you take on the role of an Inspired hero battling dastardly villains and bizarre monsters!" This doesn't mean that you can't use the system to run a game based on the type of material found in Spicy Ranch Romances for instance, it just means you'll get little support from the rules if you do.

Of course, since I am a fan of the character pulps and that was the sort of game I wanted to run, the narrow focus of the rules was a feature as far as I was concerned, not a limitation.

Presentation

Adventure! is the third game in White Wolf's Aeon line of games, following Trinity (1998) and Aberrant (1999). Like the two previous games, the rules-book is a 10 x 7 inch paperback, making it the same dimensions as a pulp magazine, which is a nice touch.

The cover is set up to look like a reproduction of a pulp magazine cover, complete with nicks and tears along the edges. It shows an adventurer with Clark Gable's moustache surrounded by human skeletons facing a giant earth worm in what appears to be an Incan temple. The art (by Mark Chiarello) is good and the subject matter certainly suits the nature of the game.

The dominant colours on the cover are brown and yellow -- which is something I've noticed about most Pulp games. The covers (or box fronts) tend to be brown and yellow. The only exceptions I can think of are the original GURPS Cliffhangers (1989) which was mostly blue and TSR's The Adventures of Indiana Jones (1984) which was green. I don't know why this is. Do the artists and art directors automatically think of old yellowed paper and photographs and assume that's the "look" they need to capture? The covers of pulp magazines were often very brightly coloured -- the term "garish" was regularly used to describe them -- and it would be nice to see a Pulp game that chose to emphasise that aspect of the tradition. Browns and yellows tend to disappear into the background rather than jump out at people and that certainly can't help sales. This isn't a criticism of the Adventure! cover, which is fine; it's just an observation about a broader trend in this gaming genre.

Also, like other games in the Pulp genre, the cover of Adventure! sports a "10¢" label. Unlike Daredevils (1982) or the Torg Terra sourcebook (1994) which featured similar labels, there isn't a "not" in front of the "10¢". This seems potentially confusing; at least one of my players briefly thought that the game actually cost ten cents -- he commented on how well preserved it was given what he assumed must be it's great age.

The interiors are all black-and-white and printed on cream-coloured paper. Unlike Trinity and Aberrant, there is no colour section. This may be the result of cost considerations, but it also suits the subject matter. As noted above, the pulps had black-and-white interiors.

The book is 272 pages. The first 104 pages are devoted to describing a setting built around the adventures of the members of the Aeon Society for Gentlemen (one of whom is a woman, incidentally -- the sexism is mostly in the name) and describing the world of 1925. The remaining 168 pages present the actual rules of the game, though there is some more material about the featured setting towards the back of the book.

Most of the text is presented in a small typeface arranged in two columns. The impression is of a lot of material crammed into the book -- an impression re-inforced by the sparseness of illustrations breaking up the text. The only thing working against this idea are the wide margins -- about an inch on either side of the text. Reading the rules confirms the initial impression, though: there is a lot jammed into this book. This makes the use of the wide margins an even odder design choice. Narrower margins would have allowed for either more material to have been included or for a slightly bigger typeface, making the rules easier to read.

The book has two tables of contents -- one on page 11 for the setting section arranged like the table of contents for a pulp magazine; the other on page 106 for the rules. There is also an index which is only partially cross-indexed -- that is, if you want to look up "Dexterity" you can find it both under "D" and as a subsection under "Attributes", but if you want to look up "Destructive facet" the only places you'll find it are under "F" (for "Facets") and "I" (for "Inspiration" and the subsection on "Inspiration facets"). Since I'm the sort of person who automatically looked under "D" (for "Destructive") during a break in play one session to check on some details, I found this arrangement irritating and not all that useful. The index isn't as bad as the one in second edition Mage: the Ascension (1995), which was appalling, but it still feels like looking up words in a thesaurus rather than an index.

Overall, the Adventure! rules are a good looking product. While I may disagree with some of the design choices -- the wide margins and using doctored photographs of real people in costume as illustrations in some cases -- I can't fault the implementation.

System

Most of the rules text is boilerplate with the examples changed. That is, it's the same as the corresponding sections in Trinity and Aberrant and very similar to the same sections in the various World of Darkness game books. If you've read any of those, you already know half of this.

Still, a summary for those that may not know how the Storyteller system works. Characters are described by a combination of nine Attributes (innate qualities like strength and intelligence) and thirty-five Abilities (learned skills like how to use a gun or pilot a plane). These are all rated on a 1 - 5 scale. Attributes are linked with Abilities and their ratings are added together to create skill values. So a character's skill with a gun is equal to their Dexterity (an Attribute) plus their Firearms (an Ability). Whenever performing an action, the character's player rolls a number of d10 equal to the skill value. Each die that comes up 7 or higher is counted as a "success". The more successes scored, the better the character does.

Difficult actions are handled by increasing the number of successes needed. A standard action, for example, requires only a single success, while a challenging action requires at least three successes. This results in the awkward usage where a player may roll a certain number of "successes", yet still not succeed.

A strange omission is the lack of any description of what the difficulty levels actually mean. There's a table on page 112 that tells us that a "Challenging" action has a "+2" difficulty (meaning a player needs to roll at least three successes to beat the difficulty), but there's nothing to give any sort of hint as to what type of action the designer(s) consider to be "challenging". This is odd because one of the main rules functions the gamemaster (called a "Storyteller" here) has during play is to set difficulty values. If nothing else, a potential gamemaster should come away from the rules with a basic grasp of what difficulty levels represent. A few examples of what a "Tough" or "Challenging" or "Critical" action was in this system would have been very helpful.

The mechanics are relatively simple and straightforward. Abilities are grouped under the Attributes they are used with on the character sheet. And there's a space to write in the skill total rather than having to add the two ratings together on the fly during play as you have to do in the World of Darkness games.

From a Pulp perspective, the system has one big strength and one big weakness.

The strength first. Highly accomplished characters don't have much of an advantage over ordinary folk when performing standard actions, but really come into their own as the difficulty increases. Consider for example two characters: Mr Average (Attribute 2, Ability 2, rolling 4 dice) and Doc Savage (Attribute 5, Ability 5, rolling 10 dice). Their chances of succeeding at various difficulties are summarised in the following table (the number in brackets is the minimum number of successes the character needs to roll):

Mr Average Doc Savage

Standard (1) 87% 99%

Tough (2) 52% 95%

Challenging (3) 18% 83%

Difficult (4) 3% 62%

Critical (5) - 37%

Note that on a standard action, Doc enjoys only a 12 percentile advantage over Mr Average. Both characters are likely to succeed. However, as the difficulty goes up, Doc really comes into his own. While Mr Average's chance of success drops rapidly, Doc's declines at a much slower rate, so that even when performing a critical action, Doc has a better than one-in-three chance of pulling it off. Extraordinary actions are where Pulp characters really come into their own and the mechanics catch this quite nicely.

The weakness of the mechanics is in many ways the mirror image of the strength. It's difficult to create an incompetent character. An average character with no training (Attribute 2, Ability zero, rolling 2 dice) has a 64% chance of succeeding at any standard action. The rules are vague as to what constitutes a "standard action", but I would presume that it would be the more demanding everyday use of an Ability -- prepare a basic, nutritious meal, tune an engine, maintain a ledger, write a basic newspaper story, diagnose and treat a common illness, fire a gun at a target and so on. All characters can do all of these things really well. Several players spent part of one session pointing out that, apparently, the world of the game is one in which there are no service stations since everybody is a competent mechanic, no accountants since everyone can keep the books, no ambulance attendants since every bystander can perform competent first aid and so on. Basically, characters start out pretty good and work their way up from there. It's hard for Pulp heroes to really stand out from such a crowd. If there's no ordinary, then there's nothing to measure extraordinary against.

A specific example that occurred in play: The player characters were investigating a crime scene, the study of an elderly professor who had been shot, when one of the PCs opened a closet door to find the professor's six-year-old granddaughter hiding there. The girl had managed to find the professor's colt six-shooter and, assuming that the PCs were the same people as had killed her grandfather, was threatening our heroes with the gun. Under the rules as written, the little girl (Dexterity 1, Firearms zero, rolling 1 die) had a 40% chance of hitting one of the player characters if she fired. That seemed a tad high. As gamemaster, I could have applied a +1 difficulty to the action (on the presumption that firing the gun was a "tough" action for her), but that would have made it impossible for her to hit anyone and I wanted the gun to have some element of threat. Under the rules as written, the little girl either had a 40% chance of success or none at all.

[For those that may be interested, I dealt with the problem by adopting a house rule allowing me to raise the target number for the little girl's roll to 10, giving her only a 10% chance of actually hitting anyone. A less than satisfactory solution]

Extras

To an extent the rules recognise the problem of over-competence and address it. There are rules for what are called "Extras". These are a special class of characters used to represent typical thugs and ruffians. Extras roll only one die for their actions, no matter what their actual Attributes and Abilities are. And they have only three Health levels (as compared to regular characters, who have seven), meaning they tend to go down more easily.

I don't know about this rule. I never really liked it in Feng Shui (1996) where I first encountered a similar rule, and I like it even less here. When The Shadow takes out an entire gang of thugs, I always got the impression it was because The Shadow was really good at what he does, not because he was fighting cripples. The idea of The Shadow or Doc Savage beating up on a bunch of handicapped leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Well, it does in my mouth, anyway.

Beyond that, Adventure! is set in the period between the wars and one of the threats Player Characters can be expected to confront is Nazism, an ideology that maligns those it doesn't like as untermensch (under-men or less-than-humans). Presumably, the Player Characters will oppose this noxious idea and champion the democratic notion that all people are fundamentally equal. However, the game system undermines them, since the Nazis are obviously right -- there are untermensch (the Extras) and, oddly enough, they always end up being the opposition. Didn't anyone give the sub-text of this rule even a moment's consideration? (The chapter on Roleplaying has the standard literary aspirations of a White Wolf game and talks about Theme and Mood, but there's no mention of sub-text.)

With its emphasis on Heroic Characters, the hero pulps (and this game) skirt very close to Fascist fantasy, which is why I think it's important to make it clear that's not what the material actually is. Pulp stories are power fantasies but they are the sort of power fantasy a put-upon twelve-year-old has. When your father's dead; when your mother is taking in laundry to make ends meet; when your little sister is sick and needs special -- and expensive -- medicine; and when you are being bullied daily by the local toughs, better you dream of being capable and powerful than fall into despair. Fantasies of being wealthy and influential and a skilled surgeon or detective who could make things right; who could help people.

These are not the narcissistic power fantasies of a comfortable twelve-year-old dreaming of an expensive pair of sneakers, their own entertainment system and the current teen heart-throb at their beck and call.

Pulp fantasy involves might, but it's might for right, not might makes right. Pulp heroes demonstrate qualities of decisiveness, endurance, self-sacrifice and courage in support of society -- not just self-interest. It's important to keep that in mind, otherwise it becomes difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Actually, without that, I think the difference disappears. In this context, the Extras rule sends the wrong sort of message.

Variability

The Adventure! mechanics tend to produce highly variable results. That is, a character performing a particular action can get lots of successes one roll, only a single successes the next roll, a few successes the roll after that, then lots of successes again, and so on.

Whether this is a virtue or a flaw depends on your perspective.

The rules state that the more successes rolled, the greater the flair with which the character performs the action. There is a table on page 112 listing the various Degrees of Success (1 success rolled is a Standard success, 3 successes rolled is a Remarkable success, 5 successes rolled is a Phenomenal success), but, as with Difficulty levels, there is no description of what the different levels mean.

The way the mechanics work, a character who is the world's greatest engineer, for example, can be phenomenally successful one turn and then only scrape by with a standard success the very next turn. For those that expect that a highly skilled character will display some sort of consistency, this aspect of the system can be considered a flaw.

However, these sort of highly variable results do reflect an aspect of the genre. The abilities of characters in the hero pulps were often described by superlatives. There were any number of characters who were among the best in the world in their particular fields. Yet these characters would often make the most elementary errors. Sometimes this was the result of idiot plotting (the only way the plot could advance was if the character behaved like an idiot) and sometimes it was due to the limits of the author's actual knowledge (no matter how brilliant a character is described as being, their actual knowledge cannot be any greater than the author's). Either way, though, characters in the pulps were fairly inconsistent and from that perspective, the variability of the system is a virtue.

Our group tended to ignore the Degrees of Success rule, simply because we considered trying to figure out how a character performed an action with more or less flair in any given situation was more trouble and time consuming than it was worth. We tend to be a practical bunch who figure that when a character leaps from a balcony to grab hold of a chandelier to swing across the room, the important question is whether or not the character actually manages to catch the chandelier, not how well they do so. Of course, if there were a set of Olympic judges sitting to one side, ready to hold up a series of score cards, how well the character leaps and grabs might be important, but in the middle of an action scene, any level of success will do. Or, as one of my players is fond of saying: "Rough enough, good enough."

A Preoccupation With Dice

Many of the rules presented in the book have a preoccupation with adding and subtracting dice. This gives the mechanics a finicky feel, often at the expense of roleplaying.

As an example, here is the entirety of the pursuit rules from page 189:

Pursuit [Animal Handling, Athletics, Drive, Pilot]: Catching someone who's desperately trying to avoid your character involves several different rolls. If one party is significantly faster than and/or farther away from the other (higher movement rate or faster vehicle or helluva running start), the Storyteller may declare that party outstrips the other one without extended drama. If the getaway is in doubt, resolve pursuit as an extended action.
     The target starts with a number of additional dice based on her distance from pursuers: one for every two meters ahead of pursuers on foot or one for every 10 meters ahead of pursuers in vehicles or on mounts. Exceptionally long foot or mounted chases might involve Endurance tests, and long vehicle chases may factor in fuel consumption. Dice may also apply if one party is significantly faster than the other. For foot pursuit, add one die for every two meters' worth of movement rate difference. For vehicular pursuit, add one die for every 10 kph worth of difference.
     The target and the pursuers roll the appropriate Ability dice pool (depending on the type of pursuit) each turn, adding new successes to any rolled in previous turns. (The further the quarry distances herself from pursuit, the more dice her player rolls and the more quickly she might get away. The reverse is also true if the pursuer closes the gap.) If the pursuer accumulates more total successes than the target, he catches up to his quarry. As the target accumulates successes, she gains distance from her pursuers and may use that lead to lose her opponents. Each success that the quarry accumulates beyond the pursuers' total acts as +1 difficulty to any Awareness rolls pursuers must make to remain on the target's tail. If the quarry botches, she stumbles or ends up at a dead end.
     The Storyteller may call for pursuers to roll Awareness at any time (although not more than once per turn). On a failure, the target is considered to have slipped away (into a crowd, around a bend, into a cloud bank). On a botch the target vanishes immediately.

Note the concern with adding and subtracting dice to represent various aspects of the situation (distance and speed). Note also that there's nothing for players to actually do, except roll dice. I'm serious; read the quoted passage again. Players are not called on for any sort of input at all. You could play out a chase using dice rolled by your left hand versus dice rolled by your right hand without any difficulty since everything is handled by adjusting and rolling dice pools.

In a pursuit, characters make a whole range of tactical decisions -- "Do I run down the busy street and try to lose myself in the crowd or do I turn into the alley and try to get over the fence at the end before my pursuer catches up with me?" or "Do I slow down enough to knock over the garbage bins and create an obstacle for those chasing me or do I just concentrate on running as fast as I can?". The rules above have no provision for this sort of thing. Instead, you just adjust and roll dice pools and interpret the results.

The trouble with this approach is that it's boring. Just sitting there rolling dice over and over again gets really old really fast. Some people may enjoy this sort of thing, but none of them were playing in our group. It's also frustrating. Players like to feel that they have some control over their fate, that the outcomes they experience depend at least in part on the decisions they make. Well, the players in my group do, anyway. The system above leaves characters entirely at the mercy of dice rolls.

The way the system works in practice is that the dice are rolled as many times as necessary and then someone looks at the results and interprets them much like an augur looking at the flight of birds or a soothsayer reading the entrails of a sacrifice. The interpretation is dressed up with appropriate action and incident and transformed into a narrative which is then related to the players. This is Storytelling in the most literal sense, with the players reduced to being little more than an audience -- no more than story listeners.

There are probably groups who enjoy this type of approach, but I regard it as very poor game design. Games are interactive by their very nature -- players have to actively participate or there is no game. Rules such as the one above may live up to the "Storytelling" part of Adventure!'s label, but they fall well short of the "Game" aspect.

To be fair, the Pursuit rules are probably the single worst example in the book, but many of the systems have a similar tendency of being more concerned with adjusting dice pools than with accommodating player input.

Characters

The various numbers (collectively called "Traits" here) used to describe characters are much the same as those found in Trinity and Aberrant (or, indeed, any of the World of Darkness series of games).

There are nine Attributes representing the character's innate qualities: Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, Perception, Intelligence, Wits, Appearance, Manipulation and Charisma.

There are thirty-five Abilities representing acquired expertise. These are arranged under the various Attributes. For example, under Dexterity are Athletics, Firearms, Legerdemain, Martial Arts and so on.

Some of the assignments are a little odd. Archery is listed under Strength, for instance. While this makes some sense -- it does take strength to draw a bow -- the quality that distinguishes a good archer from a poor one is the capacity to hit what they aim for. As such, I would list it under Perception myself; something that reflects the fact that great archers generally end up acquiring nicknames that emphasise their visual acuity -- "hawk-eye" and the like -- rather than the power of their biceps. Similarly, Rapport (understanding others), another Ability more suited to Perception, is listed under Charisma.

It is easy enough to reassign such Abilities, though. There is a section in the rules on "Cross-Matching" -- temporarily linking an Ability with an Attribute other than the one it's listed under for special situations -- which is only a short house rule away from making such cross-matches permanent.

Abilities can go up to a value of six, as contrasted with other White Wolf games where five is the maximum. The sixth point represents complete mastery of the Ability in question; the character is so good they have transcended contemporary standards and are among the best in the world in that field. This is a nice touch as many Pulp characters are described as being leading authorities in their various fields -- just think of Doc Savage's five aides.

In practical terms the sixth point just adds an additional dice to the character's dice pool, which isn't actually all that useful. In practice, we tended to treat the sixth point as an automatic success so that a character with mastery in a particular Ability didn't have to roll for actions at a standard difficulty. This worked quite well, but it is a house rule, not something found in the game book.

The sixth point is also necessary if the character is to use the Super-Science rules to create new gadgets and the like. I discuss this further below, in the section on Super-Science.

The description of each Attribute and Ability opens with a short bit of fiction showcasing that Attribute or Ability in use. Most of these are quite good, hitting a variety of tones, from humorous to sombre. This is a nice touch which helps convey an appropriate feel for the game. The actual descriptions are generally clear and straightforward, if a little terse.

The exception was Linguistics. The description suggested that each point of Linguistics gave a character mastery of an entire "language family" or "language group". I'm not really sure what is meant by a "language group", but a Language Family is a fairly large collection of related languages. Families are divided into Branches. For example:

THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE FAMILY

Celtic Branch

Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Breton

    extinct: Cornish, Gaulish, Cumbrian, Manx, Galatian

Germanic Branch

English, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, Afrikaans, German, Yiddish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroes, Icelandic

    extinct: Anglo Saxon, Old Norse, Frankish, Gothic, Lombardo, Visigoth, Vandal

Romance (Latin) Branch

Italian, Sardinian, French, Provencial, Catalonian, Spanish, Ladino, Galician, Portuguese, Romansh, Romanian, Moldavian

    extinct: Latin, Oscan, Umbrian, Sabine, Dalmatian

Slavic Branch

Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Polish, Sorbian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Kashubian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Bosnian

    extinct: Old Church Slavic

Baltic Branch

Lithuanian, Latvian

    extinct: Prussian

Hellenic Branch

Modern Greek

    extinct: Mycenaean, Koine, Byzantine Greek, Classical Greek (Attic, Doric, Ionic, Aeolic)

Illyric Branch

Albanian

Anatolian Branch

    extinct: Hittite, Lydian, Lycian, Luwian, Palaic

Armenian Branch

Armenian

Iranian Branch

Farsi, Kurdish, Pashto, Baluchi, Ossetian, Tadzhik

    extinct: Persian, Avestan

Indic Branch

Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Sindhi, Marathi, Gujerati, Konkani, Sinhalese, Maldivian, Romany

    extinct: Sanskrit, Pali

Tokharian Branch

    extinct: Turfanian, Kuchean

Everyone in the gaming group agreed the system was a tad over-generous. Giving a character mastery of the entire Indo-European Family for a single dot in Linguistics seemed a little excessive. Instead we adopted the house rule that each point gave a character mastery of a Branch of a Language Family. This allowed characters to be appropriately poly-lingual, without making every character excessively so. If nothing else, if every character is linguistically facile, it would undercut the distinctiveness of those characters specifically designed to be masters of many tongues.

Of course, it's not clear that the text does actually mean each point is worth a complete language family. It's not clear what it means at all. As I said, the description mentions both language "families" and "groups" while all the examples offered are of individual languages. The overall impression is of confusion caused by inadequate research.

There are thirteen Backgrounds representing special advantages a character might have such as Allies, a Reputation or Resources (wealth). Two are worth special comment: Menagerie and Nemesis.

Menagerie represents animal companions, either a few superior specimens or lots of ordinary beasts. This is an appropriate background for a Pulp game, whether to represent the hoards of creatures a Lord or Lady of the Jungle such as Tarzan, Ki-Gor or Sheena might call on or to represent that special horse or dog or falcon that accompanies the character. The trouble is, though the book contains write-ups for a range of standard animals, there are no rules on how to create superior specimens -- or, indeed, how to individualise the animals at all. The world of the game is apparently one in which all the members of a species (with the notable exception of Homo sapiens) are all interchangeable clones of one another. And most of the animals presented in the book come across as rather puny. A horse, for example, is listed as having a Strength of 4; this in a game where human beings can have a Strength up to 5, so it is not only possible for an ordinary character to be as strong as a horse, it's possible for them to be stronger.

Nemesis represents an enemy of the character: a John Sunlight to the character's Doc Savage, a Shiwan Khan to the character's Shadow or a René Belloq to the character's Indiana Jones. In contrast to all the other Backgrounds, this one benefits the player more than the character. The player of a character with Nemesis enjoys additional time as the centre of attention in any adventure concerning the nemesis since their character will be in the middle of things. The character, by contrast, gains someone dedicated to pounding their head in. I suppose it could be argued that this sort of rivalry could inspire the character to greater heights of achievement, but most Pulp characters seem perfectly capable of attaining those heights without such motivation.

Nemesis is also unusual in the sense that while Pulp characters may have an arch-rival, that arch-rival rarely appears in more than a few adventures. John Sunlight appeared in only two out of 181 Doc Savage adventures, Shiwan Khan appeared in only four out of 325 Shadow stories and Belloq appeared only in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). The encounters in which the arch-rivals did appear were epic in scope, but Pulp villains don't return with quite the monotonous regularity of comic-book villains. Not all Adventure! campaigns will hew to this pattern, of course, but Nemesis would obviously be less productive as a Background in those campaigns that do.

As with Abilities, Backgrounds can go up to a value of six, with the sixth point representing a superlative degree of the particular Background. The sixth point of Resources, for example, gives the character "Wealth Beyond Avarice". In the game, these sixth points are referred to as Enhancements. Not every Background has an enhancement listed -- there are eight Enhancements and thirteen Backgrounds -- but it is easy enough to create appropriate Enhancements for those Backgrounds left out if you need them.

Some Enhancements have specific game mechanics associated with them, but generally they are implemented entirely through roleplaying. The character just has a unparalleled advantage at their disposal.

Again, this is a nice touch, as many Pulp characters possess extraordinary equipment or wealth or influence. Enhancements are basically an invitation for players to be completely over-the-top when describing some of their character's advantages. While the possibility of abuse exists, such things are very much in the spirit of the genre. And if the characters can have really impressive advantages, so can their opponents.

Knacks

Which brings us to Knacks, the special abilities or qualities or prerogatives enjoyed by Pulp characters. Basically, they are the "powers" which Pulp characters have, like Disciplines in Vampire: the Masquerade (1991), Schticks in Feng Shui or Feats in 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons (2000). They are what make the characters special.

Examples include Dramatic Entrance (the character always makes an dazzling first impression); Jack of All Tongues (the character is a master of multiple languages -- the system doubles the number of languages the character gains with each point of Linguistics, we rewrote it so that the character did gain an entire language family with each point rather than just a branch like everyone else); One-Man Army (the more opponents the character faces in combat, the more effective they are); Psychic Hand (telekinesis); Cloak of Dread (the character can be really, really scary); Cloud the Mind (the character is effectively invisible); Heightened Senses (extraordinarily acute sight, smell, hearing, etc.); Body of Bronze (the character can absorb extraordinary amounts of punishment without harm); and Indisputable Analysis (the character can make deductions from the available evidence that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame). The fact that some of the names evoke classic bits from the pulp Doc Savage (Body of Bronze) and the old-time radio show Shadow (Cloud the Mind) is a nice touch that enhances the flavour of the game quite effectively.

Some of the game mechanics associated with particular Knacks display the preoccupation with adding and subtracting dice already commented on, making them occasionally awkward in play as everything screeches to a halt as the player tries to figure out exactly how many dice they need to roll. Other Knacks seem a tad frivolous. After encountering Complete Privacy (a nearby string quartet or backfiring car or fluttering flag always drowns out the character's words or obscures their face when someone is trying to listen in or unobtrusively observe them) in the rules, I fully expected to find similar filmic abilities such as Convenient Parking (no matter how heavy the traffic and crowded the street, the character always finds a parking space directly in front of where they need to go); Opportune Media (whenever the character opens a newspaper or turns on a radio, they always encounter a pertinent news story); Propitious Wallet (whenever paying a cabbie, the character always plucks a bill that exactly covers the fare out of their wallet without looking); and Perfect Coiffure (no matter what kind of trials and tribulations the character has been through, their hair and make-up remain immaculate). Of course those that like that sort of thing may be disappointed to find only Complete Privacy.

Overall, though, the Knacks are very, very good. Some of them shade over into being low-level super-powers, but most of them manage to straddle the heroic middle ground between mundane realism and preposterous fantasy that defines Pulp characters. While Pulp heroes are better than ordinary people, they are not cosmic powered super-heroes. The feats they accomplish are barely believable -- except for the regularity with which they pull off such feats, which is pretty unbelievable -- and the various Knacks capture this quality well.

Given the comments I've made about other aspects of Adventure! some of you may be wondering why I've persisted in running a game using the system for over four months. The answer is the Knacks. They work so well at capturing the feel of Pulp as a genre that it's almost worth putting up with the various peculiarities of the system. Almost. The designers -- Clayton A. Oliver is responsible for the Knacks chapter, if I'm reading the credits right -- deserve congratulations for nailing this aspect of the genre so effectively.

Knacks are divided into three types, depending on what type of special effects they have in play. Heroic Knacks come across as extraordinary levels of ability or luck. Psychic Knacks come across as manifestations of the powers of the mind, either fakir-like discipline or full-fledged psionic powers. Dynamic Knacks come across as super-powers. There are 23 Heroic Knacks, 21 Psychic Knacks and 21 Dynamic Knacks. Further, Psychic and Dynamic Knacks are arranged into three levels, depending on how powerful they are. The levels exist just for costing purposes -- higher level Knacks are more expensive than lower level ones. A character can have any Knack their player wants, they don't have to work their way up through any sort of hierarchy.

While much is made of the division between Heroic, Psychic and Dynamic Knacks in the rules, in practice it means very little. Since the difference between them is entirely how they are described in play, any Knack can be assigned to any one of the three categories simply by changing its special effects. One of the players in my first campaign wanted the Dynamic Knack Blindfighter (the ability to fight and sense things in low-light or dark conditions) as a Heroic Knack for his Kato-like martial artist character, explaining it as being the result of the character's training by the famous blind Zen Archers of Pendrang. This seemed reasonable and appropriate to the genre, so I allowed him to reassign Blindfighter while also requiring his character to have an appropriately high level in Archery -- which, it turned out, he already did.

This sort of reassignment isn't explicitly allowed in the rules, but in the minimal write-ups various sample characters get towards the end of the book a couple quite specifically have "Dynamic versions of..." or "a special Psychic Knack equivalent to..." Knacks from other categories.

Character Types

The system divides characters up into three types: Daredevils, Mesmerists and Stalwarts. The basic difference is in the type of Knacks the character gets to use. Daredevils use Heroic Knacks, Mesmerists get Psychic Knacks and Stalwarts use Dynamic Knacks. Of course, since Knacks can easily be reassigned from one category to another, as explained above, the distinction between the three types isn't as important as a casual reading of the rules might lead one to believe.

All three types can be justified by pointing to examples in the source material, but their primary function is to lay the ground work for the other two games in the series. Basically, Mesmerists are proto-psions (the stars of Trinity) and Stalwarts are proto-aberrants (the stars of Aberrant). Daredevils are unique to Adventure! as far as I'm aware.

In practice, the character types serve as a way for players to signal what type of game they want. If all the players decide to play Stalwarts, for instance, it's obvious that they are interested in playing characters that are clearly more than human and the type of campaign they want will tend towards street-level or low-powered Golden Age super-heroes. By contrast, if all the players choose to play Mesmerists, the campaign will probably have more of a mystic Weird Tales or exotic Talbot Mundy flavour.

This approach works even in mixed groups. Most of the players in both campaigns created Daredevil characters, with a minority in each playing Stalwarts. No-one has yet chosen to play a Mesmerist. In play, I try to treat each character according to type -- the Daredevils as highly-accomplished adventurers and the Stalwarts as strangely-gifted champions. Generally, the approach has worked well. The sole exception was one player whose character was written up as a Stalwart. It turned out that the conceptualisation was of a Daredevil, but all the Knacks he wanted were Dynamic and it was easier to go with the flow and make the character a Stalwart than argue for each Knack to be reassigned. Once I realised that, though, it was easy enough to adjust the way I treated his character in play and the game proceeded apace.

Character Creation

Creating characters is a protracted mess. It can be summarised as: spend a bunch of points; then spend another bunch of points; calculate various values; then, just for a change, spend a third bunch of points; then, finally, re-calculate various values because they've changed in that third round of spending points. It's unnecessarily convoluted and time-consuming.

Officially, the process is divided into three Phases: Genesis, Transformation and Last Details. In Genesis (the first two rounds of spending points and the initial calculation of values), players create an ordinary character. Then, in Transformation (the third round of spending points), they transform that character into a Pulp hero. Finally, in Last Details (the final set of calculations), they finish up.

Each round of spending points works a little differently. In the first round, points are spent on a one-for-one basis; that is, for example, a player gets 23 Ability points and each point buys the character one dot in an Ability. In the second round, involving Bonus points, the points have to be run through a table, so that it takes two Bonus points to purchase a dot of an Ability. Finally, in the third round using Transformation points and a different table, each Transformation point gets the character five dots to distribute among their Abilities. Also, Knacks, Ability mastery and Background Enhancements (the sixth point in an Ability or Background) can only be purchased with Transformation points.

If a player changes their mind late in the process and decides they should have bought four dots of Dexterity rather than three in the initial round of spending points, it's difficult to back-track through the procedure to make the change. Almost every value is the product of three separate types of points, spent at different exchange rates. It's also difficult to reverse-engineer characters to see how they were put together.

The procedure had one unexpected (to me) benefit. I watched various players agonise over trade-offs early in the process -- should the character have a Strength of 5 and a Stamina of 1 or should they sacrifice some of that Strength for a better Stamina? -- only to discover later in the process that they had enough new points to give the character high values in both qualities. This left a couple of players feeling as if they had genuinely superior characters because, despite the agonising, they had gotten pretty much everything they had wanted.

Most of the players, however, just looked at the final result, decided that they had spent their points in a less than optimal way and grabbed a clean character sheet to do the whole thing over again. Only this time, they ran various "what-if" combinations of how to spend various points on a bit of scratch paper to one side to try and find the best way of getting the character they wanted to play. This, of course, made the entire process of creating characters even longer.

The interesting thing is that none of the players was trying to min-max the system in order to squeeze out the most powerful character they could get. Rather they were trying to craft specific characters they had envisioned and finding they had to struggle against the character creation procedure along the way.

Also, as certain players went on to create a second and, in one case, third character, I noticed they approached the entire thing in reverse order. In the official procedure, Knacks are one of the last things chosen. However, in practice, most characters are defined by their Knacks -- these determine the character's place in the ecology of the gaming group and, to a large extent, signal how the player intends to portray the character. As a consequence, players started to put together sets of Knacks, worked out how they would pay for those, and then worked their way backwards to get the Attributes and Abilities they needed. In practical terms, the character creation procedure was more of a hindrance than a help.

The procedure also seems to be built on the rather questionable notion that all Pulp heroes are transformed humans -- that they are, in effect, low-level super-heroes. While this is true to an extent for some Pulp characters, I don't think anyone can make a case that it's true for all of them.

The procedure is reminiscent of the two-Phase character creation system in Aberrant. There, players would first create a normal person in Phase One and would then add super-powers in Phase Two. This worked in Aberrant because Aberrant is a game about super-heroes and most super-heroes start off as ordinary mortals. Before there was Spider-Man, there was Peter Parker; before there was the Flash, there was Barry Allan (or Jay Garrick or Wally West, take your pick); before there was the Incredible Hulk, there was Bruce Banner. For super-heroes, a two-stage character creation process makes sense.

However, for Pulp characters, it doesn't. Some characters in the source material are transformed by events and gain special abilities as a result -- Captain Zero, the Black Bat and the Avenger for example -- but most are the product of years of dedicated effort and training. Consider Indiana Jones; there's an entire series -- The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992 - 96) -- detailing the rather extended process involved in creating the adventurer-archaeologist we meet in Raiders of the Lost Ark. There's no moment where young Indy is struck by lightning and suddenly gains all his abilities; he has to develop them the same way everyone else does: one skill at a time. The same is true of Doc Savage, The Shadow and so on. Pulp characters are not low-level super-heroes, they are high-level human beings.

That's why a two-stage character creation process doesn't work. There is no appreciable difference between the character crafted in the Genesis Phase of character creation and the one in the Transformation Phase. One imperceptibly blends into the other. It's not Billy Batson suddenly transforming into Captain Marvel, it's Doc Savage gradually coming into his full potential.

Of course, there are some super-heroes who straddle this divide as well. The one that immediately springs to mind is Batman. He, too, is the product of years of development. And writing up Batman in most super-hero games is notoriously difficult. As I recall, in Mayfair's old DC Heroes Roleplaying Game (1985) they included a special sub-system for creating Batman-type characters. That's what Adventure! needs: a specific system for creating Pulp style characters rather than an imported character creation system designed for a super-hero game.

Bits and Pieces

This section contains various odds and ends I couldn't fit elsewhere into the review. Specifically, Super-Science, Inspiration and Dramatic Editing.

Super-Science

The Super-Science rules are the gadgeteering system for Adventure! They allow characters to create bigger and better weapons, vehicles, creatures and potions.

The rules distinguish between Gadgets and Inventions. A Gadget is a special piece of equipment that is an integral part of a character conception, like the Rocketeer's rocket pack or the Green Hornet's car: the Black Beauty. Gadgets are bought with the Gadget Background. Inventions, by contrast, are devices a character has created and which only come into play now and then. In theory, any device could be either a gadget or an invention -- it's even possible for different characters to have the same basic device, one as a gadget and the other as an invention. The difference is in how the device is treated in play.

Since gadgets are bought as Backgrounds, they have a sort of Player-Character glow about them, keeping them from harm. No matter what happens, a player can be certain their character will never permanently lose a gadget. Inventions, on the other hand, are fair game. They can be lost, stolen or destroyed. The advantage of an invention is that a character can always create new inventions as they need them and circumstances dictate.

An example of the distinction: The members of Justice Inc. (featured in the Avenger stories) all have compact belt radios they use to communicate with one another. The belt radios feature in almost every Avenger story. In game terms, these would be low-level gadgets as, if a character's belt radio is ever damaged or lost, it is soon repaired or replaced.

In The Frosted Death (The Avenger #5 January 1940) Fergus MacMurdie -- or "Mac" as he prefers to be called -- one of the Avenger's aides, develops a cure to the dreaded disease of the title. In game terms, this would be an invention as it only appears in this one story and is not an essential part of the character. Indeed, almost as soon as the cure is developed, it becomes the object of theft by the villains. In other stories, MacMurdie comes up with other chemical concoctions, as needed.

The Super-Science rules deal with Inventions. Characters need have no points in the Gadget Background to use Super-Science. The reverse is also true; a character with the Gadget Background need never go anywhere near the Super-Science rules. I mention this because we had a couple of sessions of confusion in which everyone assumed that, obviously, a gadgeteer would need to have the Gadget Background. That's what comes from not reading the rules closely enough.

To engage in Super-Science, a character needs to have mastery (a sixth point) in an appropriate Ability: Engineering, Medicine or Science. It also helps if the character has an appropriate Knack: Gadgeteer for Daredevils, Scientific Prodigy for Mesmerists or Mad Scientist for Stalwarts. Each Knack works in a slightly different way, giving the character different benefits, so they're not as redundant as they may seem.

Inventions are divided into two types: Advancements and Innovations. An Advancement is something that's possible, it's just unknown during the period of the game. Essentially, characters who produce Advancements are ahead of their time. Innovations are completely off-the-wall creations such as anti-gravity devices, invisibility potions and so on. Any character can create an Advancement, but only Mesmerists and Stalwarts can produce Innovations.

Advancements are handled by adding options to existing devices, with a series of tables listing the Research and Development (R&D) cost of various enhancements. Improving the accuracy of a weapon in game terms by +1, for example has an R&D cost of 3, improving the damage by +1 has an R&D cost of 7, and so on. Innovations duplicate the effects of a Knack in a device. The interesting thing here is that some of the Knacks can be effectively duplicated by modern technology -- light-enhancing goggles simulating Blindfighter, for instance -- so some Innovations should logically be Advancements.

In practice, we encountered two basic problems with the Super-Science rules.

First, there doesn't seem to be any way to duplicate any of the cool devices or interesting applications of known principles found in actual pulp stories. Take this example from the Doc Savage story The Lost Oasis (Doc Savage Magazine #7 September 1933):

Doc sprinkled a thin film of the powder upon the deck, covering an area several feet in all directions from the body. The instant the powder came from the container, it glowed brilliantly. It became like liquid fire! But after the stuff came to rest on the deck, it ceased to glow except in spots. The spots which still shone marked the ill-fated Jules's footprints, as well as Doc's own! Doc Savage had many weird chemical mixtures at his command. Probably none were more unique than this powder. It had the quality of glowing only when jarred. The jarring caused the particles to break, exposing new surfaces to the air, and these shone momentarily because of a reaction between the compound and the air. Why the footprints glowed was simply explained. Jules and Doc, stepping upon the deck planks, had depressed the wood to a microscopic degree with their weight. The wood fibers, still in the process of springing back into position, were jarring the unusual powder enough to cause it to expose new surfaces to the air, thus creating a phosphorescent reaction.

I must admit I still have no idea how to go about handling something like Doc's phosphorescent powder under the Super-Science rules. This may be a failing on my part, but I don't think so. Most of the rules are preoccupied with improving existing devices -- making them bigger, better and more dangerous. In the pulps, though, many devices act as skill-enhancers. Doc's powder allows him to investigate crime scenes more effectively, The Shadow's suction disks allow him to scale sheer walls more easily, and so on. The best way to write up Doc's powder in game terms would be as a device that gives him a bonus (a +1 or +2) to his Investigation Ability when examining a crime scene or to his Awareness when tracking someone. Similarly, The Shadow's suction disks would be a bonus in game terms to his Athletics when climbing.

The Super-Science rules don't even touch on the idea of using devices as a way of enhancing skills. They do cover augmenting Attributes, increasing a character's Strength, Intelligence and so on, but that's not the same thing. Overall, it seems like a strange omission and a major failing.

Second, the currency the Super-Science rules trade in is time. That is, when a player totals up the R&D costs for all the options they want in an Advancement or determines what level of Knack an Innovation will be duplicating, the result is how many days their character is going to have to spend working on the invention. The total can be adjusted in various ways, but the net result is that gadgeteering characters end up worrying about budgeting their downtime while other types of characters don't.

In our first campaign, the amount of time between the first and second adventure was of concern to only the player of the gadgeteer. Initially, the gap was three weeks, but it turned out that 21 days wasn't quite enough time for the gadgeteer to complete a project, so the player lobbied for the gap to be increased to four weeks. Since it didn't matter to any of the other players, I added another week to the downtime if only because I knew that if I didn't, the player of the gadgeteer would be carefully accounting for every hour of the scenario, trying to squeeze in the remaining R&D time he needed to complete his invention.

The process also highlighted the fact that gadgeteers end up having to do more homework than other types of characters. While this wasn't a problem -- the player of the gadgeteer enjoyed working on his character between sessions -- I can see that some players might find the effort required on their part not really worth the benefit gained. Especially when other character types can gain the same level of benefit with significantly less player effort.

Also, the Super-Science rules put the emphasis on the start of the process of invention. Players work out how much time their character needs, roll the dice and adjust the time appropriately and then start blocking out how the character will be spending their downtime for the next several game weeks or months. This is completely different to pulp stories where the stress is generally on the end of the process. The first anyone is likely to hear of the Professor's Mechanical Mole is when he announces he has just finished it and invites everyone to accompany him on a test drive to the Centre of the Earth. The only time the beginning or middle of a research effort is featured in a pulp story is as an incidental bit of background detail or when it involves a race against time, as in The Frosted Death story mentioned above, where MacMurdie was struggling to find a cure to the Frosted Death while the contagion could still be contained and before the death toll got too high.

The concern with determining and allocating R&D time is realistic -- inventions don't just spring out of thin air, characters have to have been working on them before they appear. However, it is strangely unfaithful to the pulp stories that Adventure! is based on.

Inspiration and Dramatic Editing

I should also mention Inspiration. This is a special Trait possessed by heroes and villains in Adventure! -- collectively referred to as "the Inspired" -- that allows them to do amazing things. Specifically, in game terms, it allows their players to engage in Dramatic Editing.

Dramatic Editing is a process through which players can add or change details of a scene in their character's favour. Thus, if characters are trapped in a dead-end alley with no way out, their players could use Dramatic Editing to have the characters suddenly find a manhole cover underneath a garbage bin allowing the characters to quickly scurry down into the sewers and away from their pursuers. Or, if the characters are captured by vicious Arab tribesmen and brought before their sheik to be summarily executed, players could use Dramatic Editing to make the sheik a big fan of the characters' published adventures so that rather than killing them, he asks for their autograph and gives them whatever they need to continue their mission. It's even possible for a player to use Dramatic Editing to directly contradict something that's already been established, so that it turns out there is another full barrel of fuel hidden underneath all the junk at the back of the plane after all.

The way players do this is by spending Inspiration points. All player characters have an Inspiration rating, from one to ten. They have a permanent rating (which changes only very slowly) and a pool of temporary Inspiration points, which start off equal to the permanent rating at the beginning of a scenario, but increase and decrease independently of the permanent rating over the course of an adventure. The greater the impact of a bit of Dramatic Editing, the more Inspiration points it costs, from 1 point for a Minor Offscreen Effect to 4 points for an Obvious Continuity Violation.

I really can't say anything about the Dramatic Editing mechanic, since the players in my game(s) don't use it. No, that's not strictly true. They used it in one session after I did a big song and dance about the system, pointing out that Dramatic Editing was part of the Adventure! rules and we really should give the system a try. The players did just enough Dramatic Editing in that session so that they could point to it should the subject ever come up again and say, yes, they had given it a try. They have consistently ignored it ever since.

I suspect it's a style thing. Some groups like "collaborative storytelling", as it's referred to, while others don't. Mine is obviously one of those that doesn't. For what it's worth, I asked the players why they didn't like the Dramatic Editing system and got the following two responses:

"If I wanted to GM, I'd be GMing. The fact is that I'm here because I want to play. I'm not interested in having you slough off any of your GMing responsibilities onto me under the guise of 'empowering' me or similar nonsense."

"My problem with Dramatic Editing is that it doesn't correspond to anything in the character's experience. It's something players do. As such, I find it disruptive. I'd rather try to solve problems by acting through my character, not by having some deus ex machina suddenly appear."

Thus, all I can say is the Dramatic Editing system exists. Whether it is a good example of a collaborative storytelling system or a poor one is something people have to glean from some other review of Adventure!

Inspiration also serves a few other functions in the game. Various Psychic and Dynamic Knacks require the expenditure of a point of Inspiration to activate. Super-Science Innovations run off stored Inspiration energy, and characters can spend points of their own personal Inspiration to recharge such devices. Once a scene, a player can spend a point of Inspiration to double the number of dice they roll for a particular action (this one is particularly useful, given the high variability of results in the system, as noted above). And, when a player is stumped as to what they should do next, they can spend an Inspiration point to get a hint from the gamemaster -- this is referred to as Intuition within the rules, but all the players call it the "Hey, I made my Idea roll. What's my idea?" system.

Inspiration also manifests through three facets: Intuitive, Reflective and Destructive. Each of these is rated on a scale of one to five, and the total of the three facets always equals the value of the character's permanent Inspiration.

Each facet gives the character certain advantages. The value of the character's Intuitive facet is added to their Initiative allowing the character to act earlier in combat. The value of the character's Destructive facet can be added to the damage they do once per game. The effectiveness of various Knacks also depends on the value of specific facets.

The facets are an intriguing idea. Personally, I think they would have made a more interesting basis on which to distinguish characters than the Daredevil-Mesmerist-Stalwart arrangement. But that may just be me.

Setting

Finally, I should say a few words about the Adventure! setting. I've avoided talking about it through most of this review for a couple of reasons. First, I'm not using it my game(s). Second, I don't think it's all that good.

The basic premise is that in 1922 Sir Calvin Hammersmith invites a bunch of people to his London home to witness a demonstration of an engine he has designed to draw on what he calls "telluric energy". Something goes wrong and the engine explodes, flooding the world with Z-Rays. These Z-Rays cause various people to become "Inspired" and to transcend the human potential -- i.e. they become Pulp heroes and villains. The Z-Rays also cause odd things like dinosaurs to start popping up in out of the way places.

The problem I have with this premise is that it reduces all Pulp heroes (and villains) to altered super-humans of one sort or another. This isn't all that true to the source material.

Also, much the same situation was used in Aberrant -- mysterious explosion, radiation floods the world, people start "erupting" with strange powers.

From there, the setting material goes on to discuss the details of this altered world. First we have the Aeon Society itself. This is an organisation like the Empire Club in Hero Games' Justice Inc. (1984) or the Valhalla Club in the Rolemaster supplement Pulp Adventures (1997). Basically, it's a club for Pulp adventurers. The sheer persistence of this idea shows it's basic utility. It gives player characters an automatic reason to hang around together and having someone with a problem stumble into the club looking for heroic help is a classic Pulp opening. Certainly a whole bunch of Doc Savage stories started with someone showing up at his 86th floor offices asking for help; as did several Avenger stories with people coming to the Bleek Street headquarters of Justice Inc.

Most of the setting information is presented in the form of newspaper clippings, letters, personal notes and files and so on. There are excerpts from a pulp magazine called Adventure! (which doesn't look anywhere as interesting as the actual Adventure pulp from the 1920s, incidentally). This is a common approach in Pulp games, also seen in FGU's Daredevils and Wizard of the Coast's recent D20 Pulp Heroes game in the January 2002 issue of Polyhedron magazine (found on the flip-side of Dungeon #90).

The contents page for the setting section is set up like the contents page from an issue of the Adventure! pulp. A couple of things I noticed: the issue we have is Vol. XIII No. 6 and the magazine is published monthly. There's no hint of how many numbers there are to a volume, but it has to be at least six. The Street & Smith pulps were six to a volume, so let's assume that this is as well. A little mental arithmetic tells us that the magazine has been published for at least six and a half years -- longer if it started on a less than monthly schedule. There's no date, but everything in the material that follows suggests that it's January 1925. Given that and a monthly schedule means that the first issue would have had an August 1918 date. The pulp is subtitled Tales of the Aeon Society, which wasn't founded until July 1923. The explanation that occurs to me is that the Aeon Society took over an already existing pulp, so it's only since 1923 that the magazine has featured tales of the Aeon Society. Before that it was probably a general anthology magazine like the actual Adventure pulp.

The excerpts from the faux Adventure! pulp consist of an editorial and three stories, two by Greg Stolze ("Dust of Death!" and "The Mystery of Volcano Island") and one by Warren Ellis ("Under the Moon").

The Ellis story leads off the setting section and the entire book, which is unfortunate because it's not all that good. It opens in media res, but doesn't go back to fill in the details of how the characters got into the opening situation. Instead, once the opening scene is resolved, the characters go off and start a completely different adventure. The feeling is like picking up an issue of a comic that spends its opening pages resolving a cliffhanger from the previous issue and then moves onto the opening of a whole new story that ends on a cliffhanger as well. There's no sense of structure at all. I almost expect to have to buy the nest issue to find out who the new mystery villain is. Except that based on this episode, I'm really not that interested.

For what it's worth, the cover of the rules-book seems to be an illustration of the opening scene of Ellis' story. Or perhaps, Ellis wrote the opening scene to justify the cover -- which is, of course, an old pulp tradition; creating stories or scenes to justify already painted covers.

The two Stolze stories, on the other hand, are quite good. "Dust of Death!" is the opening chapter of a longer narrative and, while effective, is ultimately unsatisfying because it is just an opening chapter. "The Mystery of Volcano Island" is a complete story and a fun romp featuring action, suspense and dash of weird science. It's the best story in the book -- which may not be that much of an achievement given the competition, but it is a distinction honestly earned. Warren Ellis' name is plastered on both the front and back cover of the rules-book -- in the hope it will attract fans of his comics work, I suppose -- but Stolze is the one who actually delivers on the fiction front.

Beyond the fiction, the setting section is divided into four parts.

The first part details the origins and founding of the Aeon Society for Gentlemen. Max Mercer is the founder and his opening remarks make it clear the purpose of the Society is to act as explorers and observers of the world around them. He specifically says "we will not be policemen, vigilantes or a Star Chamber..." then, later in the same speech, he adds "we will conflict with those who seek power for its own ends, who oppress the weak and abuse the defenseless." This suggests a deep-seated confusion on his part; he doesn't seem to know what he wants. Either the Society is just a bunch of observers, aloof from the world, or they actually get involved in the muck and grime of life.

For what it's worth, I'm not sure how interesting playing a member of a society of voyeurs would be. Pulp characters tend to be more action-oriented. They are the sort of people who like to get involved. As Lester Dent put it in The Man of Bronze (Doc Savage #1 March 1933), they tend to:

...go here and there, from one end of the world to the other, looking for excitement and adventure, striving to help those who need help, and punishing those who deserve it.

The second part deals with Telluric Energy. Summary: it justifies weird stuff happening.

The third part describes various other groups and organisations in the setting. For some odd reason, this part is titled "Agents of Change". Given the game is set in a period between the wars; in a world which has just seen several old empires collapse; had most of the map of Europe redrawn; is experiencing the rise of Communism and Fascism; is only a few decades into the greatest sustained period of technological development in history; and is facing the Great Depression and the Second World War in its future; I'm not really sure how much more change it needs.

Still, the groups:

The Air Circus -- barnstormers and aviators. Suitable for Aviator characters in the cast of Bill Barnes or G-8. Apparently barnstorming isn't as financially precarious in this world as it was in the real one. Strange, since aircraft seem to be much more advanced in 1925 -- there's a plane that casually flies out to an island in the mid-Pacific in the opening story, "Under the Moon", and a reference to "the decaying hulk of an Army Air Corps transport" containing six sets of jungle survival gear that crashed near a Mayan temple later in the book (page 193). This in 1925, bear in mind.

Branch 9 -- an organisation for Operator #5- and Secret Agent 'X'-like spies to belong to. The agents are even called "operators" and referred to by letter-number codes like "operator B1" (suggesting the comic strip Secret Agent X-9 to me more than anything else). Very international -- several governments have a Branch 9 and all the Branch 9s work together. I'd have found it more interesting if the group were connected with the League of Nations (I always liked the old League), but that's just me.

The International Detective Agency -- set up by "the Old Man" in London, it's employees are called "Irregulars" (get it?). Another global organisation.

The Ponatowski Foundation -- an Explorer's Club for weird archaeologists, with some shady ties.

The Contedorri -- an employment agency for criminals. Now you know where master villains find that specialised help they always need.

The Rational Experimentation Group -- evil scientists who will stop at nothing in their quest for scientific knowledge, including experimenting on human beings. Nothing really new. And somewhat redundant given some of the real experimentation done on people in the period by government agencies in various countries during the period.

The Order of Murder -- this one is cute. You pay them and they fake your death, allowing you to escape a poor marriage, criminal prosecution, etc. Of course, now that you're "dead", you work for them. This one I really like; it suggests some interesting story ideas.

Le Salon des Femmes Nouveaux -- radical feminists out to change the world.

The Inquiry -- a conspiracy to prevent war by killing off "war-mongers". Presumably they pack up their bags and retire, declaring a "job well done" in 1928 with the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact Renouncing War, thus clearing the way for the build-up to World War Two. Maybe they and Le Salon should get together and argue about which is the more violent sex.

The fourth part is "This World of Wonder", an overview of the world circa 1925. This is the longest part of the setting section and I kept gritting my teeth all through it. It's not that it gets anything wrong, it's just that I kept think "Yes, but..." and each "but" would have added another 100 words of detail to the text. Probably tripled or quadrupled its length in the end. So, it's a good overview and I apparently know too much history.

The main criticism that I would make is that it feels wrong. I know this is vague, but there's no sense of the irrational exuberance of the Jazz Age here, or the existential despair of the Lost Generation. If anything, the feel is more immediately post-war (as in after World War Two) than the early inter-war period. That's my impression, anyway.

After the real history, we have a section on Lost Worlds and Hidden Realms. Dinosaur swamps, beast men, hidden pyramids, hints of Dracula. Plot hooks, basically.

Finally, towards the end of the book, after the rules, is a chapter on Heroes and Villains. This presents brief biographies of the seven founding members of the Aeon Society along with fourteen other individuals (mostly villains) mentioned at various places in the setting material. Each mini-biography is accompanied by a minimal write-up of the character in game terms. It's at this point in reading the book that I realised there weren't any sort of sample characters -- by which I mean full and complete character write-ups -- included anywhere in the book, not even in the chapter on creating characters. This is an odd omission. Sample characters often act as models and demonstrations of how to build appropriate characters, especially in a game that deals with characters as individual and idiosyncratic as Pulp heroes and villains.

The main -- and often, only -- Traits listed for each character were their Knacks. This really isn't surprising. As I noted above, as players gain experience with the game, they tend to do the same thing: define characters basically by their collection of Knacks.

Several of the mini-biographies are illustrated by doctored photographs featuring assorted White Wolf staff members dressed up as the featured character. These pictures really don't work. The strongest impression they give is of scenes from a Pantomime. While holding up the rules-book at the beginning of a session to show the pictures to the players did elicit a few laughs, several of the players picked up on the panto look of them and the rest of the session was regularly interrupted by cries of "Oh, no it's not!" - "Oh, yes it is!" and "It's behind you!" The only thing missing was a picture of two people dressed up as a polka-dotted panto horse.

Curiously enough, parts of the opening story by Warren Ellis also reminded me of a panto. I'm not sure why.

(In all seriousness, I wonder if there would be a market for a live-action roleplaying game based on pantomime? Could be fun. Young women dressed up as boyish heroes and large men dressed up in frocks as Dame this and Dame that, running around singing songs and making asides to bystanders. Certainly would be a change from the unrelieved earnestness found in so many LARPs. But I digress...)

Conclusion

Overall, with its Knacks, I'd say that Adventure! has set a new high-water mark for Pulp games. The Knacks really capture the feel of the genre.

Other parts of the system aren't as good -- and some of them are actually quite poor. The character creation system needs to be overhauled and expanded so that it handles a range of species (animals), not just human beings. The Super-Science rules need to be revised. The Extras rule completely sends the wrong message and should be scrapped. I really can't say anything about the Dramatic Editing rules.

The included setting is rather blah. White Wolf has announced that they will publish supplements for Adventure! only if sales of the initial game warrant it. Since most White Wolf supplements expand on details of a game setting rather than being general genre sourcebooks or the like, this really isn't something that bothers me. The Adventure! setting isn't one I want to learn more about. Obviously, other people's mileage may differ.