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Just like my reviews for Aberrant and Adventure! d20, this review will focus on the conversion between the Storyteller and d20 versions, rather than the basics of the game itself. Trinity was the first science-fiction RPG produced wholly by White Wolf (not counting Human Occupied Landfill), and heralded a bright new direction for the company. Unfortunately, due somewhat to the perception that, since, White Wolf was producing it that it must therefore be about “vampires in space”, and lack of advertising, Trinity eventually sunk. Now it has risen again. How do the two stack up?
Product Information and Book Description:
Trinity Storyteller (TST) was originally produced in [date] as the first book to the entire Trinity Universe line. For the first month or two it was produced under the title Aeon, until MTV threatened a lawsuit, feeling that the name infringed on their copyright of the show “Aeon Flux”. The name was then changed to Trinity, after the main organization of the game. There were three print runs: two spiral bound books, one in a plastic envelope (that looked pretty funky), and one in a hardcover that was slapped on after the Aeon name was changed (the hardcover spirals still said Aeon inside, but Trinity on the outside), and a $15 US soft cover. The soft cover was by far the easiest to read, the spirals just had issues with even turning the pages properly. Trinity had some 10 or 12 supplements, including 5 published continent/Order books (American Offline [Orgotek/North America], Shattered Europe [Aesculapians/Europe], Aurora Australis [Legions/Australia-Micronesia, Luna Rising [ISRA/Luna], and Stellar Frontiers [Upeo Wa Macho/Outer Colonies]), one e-book continent/Order book (Terra Verde [Norca/South America]), one unofficial continent/Order book written by the developers and published online as a text file (Asia Ascendant [Ministry of Psionic Affairs/Asia]), five adventures (the Darkness Revealed trilogy of: Descent into Darkness, Passage Through Shadow, Ascent into Light; and the Alien Encounter duology of: Invasion and Deception), the Tech Manual, the Player’s Guide (which was published in one small run and is nearly impossible to find), one Storyteller Screen, three “Field Reports” (Media, Extra-Solar Colonies, Alien Races), and one miniature game (Trinity: Battleground). Most of these products are available on DrivethruRPG.com. There have been no supplements announced for the d20 products.
Trinity d20 (Td20) is a hardcover book of some 256 pages or so. Its cover art is taken from the soft cover, which looks quite nice in the larger format. The cover shows a Leviathan jumpship coming out of teleportation, flanked by a pair of Legionnaires holding weapons, and in the vague background is a huge monster with eyes, mouths, and tentacles. The monster is popularly thought to be the Aberrant menace known as The Colony. The back cover shows a starry background with the imprint of a Psi symbol and some text. The text is missing something key. In the back of the original Trinity book the caption read “A Battle Rages Across the Stars. YOU Are the Weapon”, representing that the main characters in Trinity, the Psions, are designed to save the planet and fight the Aberrant menace. On the Td20 back, only the first half of this caption is there.
Interior Art:
There are no new pieces of artwork in Td20; it’s all taken from TST books. The interior cover is VERY nice, with the painted cover of Battleground acting as a two page interior spread, with five pieces of art at the top in styled boxes. The art are the covers of: America Offline, Luna Rising, Aurora Australis, Shattered Europe, Stellar Frontiers, and the Player’s Guide. It’s really quite a beautiful cover, though I wonder if perhaps they should have used the more famous Trinity painting, the “Sidney Battle of Sidney Space Port”, showing dozens of Legions Psions fighting off a hoard of monsters that look like the bastard progeny of Mythos gods and deep sea animals.
The first hundred pages or so are all in character, and were in color in the core book. They lose a lot of their punch in black and white, especially since some of the art is particularly nice (the hologram heads look particularly neat in color). There’s also a recruiting poster for the Psi Orders and the Aeon Trinity, which was GREAT in color, but loses almost all its punch in black and white. It’s like Uncle Sam in bright red, white, and blue pointing out of a picture and saying “I Want YOU” in big red letters, and Uncle Sam in gray, white, and more gray, pointing and saying “I want you” in more gray. It just loses something.
The interior art after that is quite nice, they chose most of the nice art from the book, though there are some Lief Jones pictures that don’t look as great (they fit, but there’s just something…off about them). Most of the class pictures are well chosen, though, and the art layout is, overall, quite well placed, and some of the pictures near captions or descriptions are even better than the original core book because they had more appropriate pieces from other books to build upon.
Chapters 1-8: These chapters are, once again, taken wholesale from the original book, though in black and white. Though some of the text is easier to read in larger font, the art loses a certain punch and thus the increase of size is only a debatably an enhancement.
Chapter 9: Character
The first interesting note that comes up in the 9th chapter is a rather significant sidebar that was in neither Adventure or Aberrant d20. This one deals with using d20 Modern and d20 Future with the Trinity Universe games. It is at this point that the reason behind using the Player’s Handbook as a basic manual rather than d20 Modern comes up: the writers simply felt that more people had the PHB than had d20M, which is probably true. It’s a minor note, but something that people have been asking for a while. The sidebar isn’t overly helpful, but it does suggest the option (and aside from the fact that the “Core” Classes don’t have perquisites, it IS easy to use them as Advanced Classes and the “Prestige” classes as d20M Prestige Classes). It also, notably, would allow for more “Everyman” PCs than at the moment with the current Core Classes.
After this the chapter moves on to the Psychic Template. This is pretty standard, with the Psi characteristic (Trinity’s equivalent to Inspiration and Quantum) based on Constitution, Intelligence, and Wisdom, with an additional level every four character levels. It also confers a bonuses to Intelligent and disease resistance. The Intelligence bonus is a bit odd, perhaps Wisdom would make more sense, but it does fit with the original Psychic Template from Adventure! d20. The section also presents Psychic Levels, which function essentially like Daring and Superhuman Levels. The first level gives the character access to 3rd and 4th level psi powers, while the second gives access to 5th. The second Psychic Level also allows a character to gain Psi every 3 levels instead of every 4. Overall, it’s a pretty good deal, but comes off a bit bland for some reason.
Following this are the core classes: Academic (scientists, mechanics, librarians, etc., this class was called Scholar in the other two games, but “Academic” makes a bit more sense), Entertainer (actors, musicians, apparently also professional athletes), Entrepreneur (self employed pilots, diplomats, pirates, etc., this is one of really thematic classes for Td20, like Aristocrat in Adventure! d20), Investigator (cops, freelance journalists, bounty hunters, etc.), Scoundrel (basically any kind of thief), and Warrior (yeah…like the name says). The class pictures are pretty appropriate, and are a mix from across the books. They’re often pictures of NPCs that actually DID those jobs (the Entertainer, for instance, is a blind clairsentient Muzzein-Bang diva from “Luna Rising”, while the Investigator is an ISRAn bounty hunter, also from “Luna Rising”).
After this come the prestige classes, which overall aren’t too bad. There’s the Diplomat, which is a pretty useful class in a setting with as much weird politics as Trinity. Then there’s the Explorer, also quite appropriate, who specializes in the physical side of the Indiana Jones-type stuff. After this is the Mercenary, which has become a stand-by of the d20 Trinity Universe books, and which I’ve always thought should just be a high level Warrior. The Scientist and Space Jockey prestige classes really make the section shine, though. Trinity’s a setting that has a very special place for daring pilots willing to be pull crazy, bone-headed maneuvers in space fighters. And scientists…Trinity also has a long tradition of having a place for heavy scientific characters. The final two classes that round out the section, the Technologist and the Troubleshooter, are ok, but nothing really special. The Technologist is neat, and useful in the setting, but comes off as a second rate version of the Inventor from Adventure! d20. The Troubleshooter seems to be there so that the writers could stuff everything else they couldn’t put in any other classes, thus turning it into a jack-of-all-trades. While there’s also precedent for this in the setting (say, on mining colonies where everyone has to pull five different jobs just to keep the life support systems up), and in indeed in sci-fi in general, the class comes off as a bit rushed and badly described. The single paragraph description doesn’t quite explain it well enough beyond the “Jack-of-all-trades”.
There’s a skill listing after the classes, but it’s really nothing super-neat, though “Bang” does appear as a Perform style, and “Noetics” makes it in as a Knowledge.
Chapter 10: Feats
The Feats are, once again, relatively normal stuff. They’re nothing super-special, and are mostly just modern stuff to add to the Feats in the PHB.
The Background Feats are pretty nice, and once again are pretty faithful transfers over from TST. Citizenship makes an appearance, and works pretty well. By the third grade you have citizenship in 6 different nations, which is actually one more than in Trinity. This is always useful, especially since some nations don’t look too kindly on strangers in a setting where China got to be the major world power partially by threatening to turn the entire planet into a wasteland, and the Federated States of America are more often referred to as the “Fascist States of America”. Device also appears, and works MUCH better in than in TST, where there were no concrete rules as to just what the mechanical differences between a Level 1 Device was and a Level 5 device was. You always knew the level 5 Device was bigger and better, but never by how much. Now there’s a system for it, which is quite welcome.
The Psi Feats are, by and large, disappointing, and I have a feeling most were culled from the Psionics Handbook. Auxiliary Mode and Greater Auxiliary Mode are useful and relics of TST, but Hide Display? Hide Display is a feat which allows you to hide the sensory display of your psionic powers (they all have them, yes, even telepathy…goodbye, Psi Cops; hello, Scanners). This is really the first indication that the transfer of powers may not be 100% faithful to the original Storyteller addition. I’ll deal with this more in the next chapter.
Chapter 11: Psi
This chapter starts by dealing with the number of Power Points a psion receives at character creation. In short, they receive rather a lot. In TST, you had a number of Psi Points equal to your Psi. All powers cost at least one Psi to use, so you had to be careful. They were also relatively underpowered. Now…now powers are cheap, you get a lot of power points (a first level character with Psi 1 gets 11 power points to start), and the powers have a bit more bang.
After this comes Attunement, which is basically a power that all psions have to sense psychic energy. In TST characters had a really long range on this, and it was largely a passive power. In Td20 it has a minor, non-system long range passive effect that GMs are told to ignore (because apparently it’s too hard to work in game, but not much explanation is given as to why), and instead works on a VERY short range active effect. Characters now apparently block Attunement out until they want to actively use it, sort of like telepaths in Babylon 5 (Bester can always hear a din of thoughts behind him, but he has to want to read peoples minds to do so). Additionally…even the active form is near useless, as the it’s d20+Psi, and the lowest DC on the chart is a 15 (with the highest being a 23). This makes most Psions with under Psi 5 virtually “psi-blind” for the purposes of Attunement. Furthermore, while Attunement doesn’t give many benefits, you can take damage from it! Backlash rules are included, and start at things occurring at five times your Attunement range. What this means is that, while you may not be able to sense the Aberrant in the next room, but when grandma dies you’ll be hit with a splitting headache and nausea if you’re in the next city over. This is, honestly, pretty silly, but the ranges for Attunement are pretty easily tweaked.
While Attunement gets heavily weakened, Tolerance, how much bio-tech you can take, gets an upgrade. You can now hold on to being overloaded for days rather than a few minutes, meaning that Psions CAN strap into bio-VARGs for short periods without failing and getting badly overloaded. This is nice, since there were times in TST where you just couldn’t get enough decent bio-ware on you for a given situation.
Taint also is a factor in the book. Psions are now affected by the presence of Quantum energy, which gives progressive penalties to Psi rolls (which makes sense, but badly reduces the ability of Psions to fight Aberrants). However, Psions also have an innate resistance to Quantum powers, enabling them to make a Fortitude save for half damage against Quantum attacks.
Chapter 12: Aptitudes
Chapter twelve covers Psi powers. It is, in general, a rather disappointing conversion. The chapter starts off talking about how characters gain Psi Powers. Rather than in Aberrant and Adventure! d20, Td20 Psi power progression is handled more like spell progression, and is distinctly counter-intuitive. At first level upon taking the Psychic Template the character gains the 0th level power of his Aptitude, and two 1st level powers. Next level he gains the third 1st level power. The level after that he gains two 2nd level powers. And on, and on. This is OK, I suppose, but it takes a bit of thinking and means that, eventually, all Psions within a given order have the same power spread by a given level, with no room for early specialization like there was in TST (so you could have one character starting the game with, say, Telekinesis 3, and another with Mindsharing 2, Empathy 1, and another with all three Vitakinesis powers at 1, this normalizes things now to a rather annoying degree, and keeps characters for specializing).
The section runs into further problems when it begins talking about Displays. Displays are sensory stimuli that occur when you activate your powers. As I understand it, this is a hold-over from the Psionics Handbook for D&D, but doesn’t fit very well with Trinity. You can spend a power point to negate it, but the concept itself seems silly. In TST there was no indication to outside observers when someone used Telepathy. There was Scanners-style buzz in their heads, no dramatic music. Telepathy was vaguely insidious because of the setup of the Ministry and the fact that, unless they were wearing uniforms, anyone could be a telepath and you’d never know. The same went for Clairsentience, and certain uses of Vitakinesis. It just doesn’t fit into the setting for most powers. There are some powers that WERE written in TST as having physical displays (Teleportation, for example, typically is accompanied by a burst of light and sound due to vacuums and suchlike), but I’m not sure why those couldn’t be noted in power descriptions rather than saying “all powers have displays unless otherwise noted”. This really detracts from the feel of the game.
Finally, Psions can try to boost their powers, much like Novas boosting their Quantum abilities. This required a few more Power Points and a saving throw of various sorts depending on what the character is trying to do.
After this, the chapter finally gets in to the powers themselves. The powers are provided in a big clump, like spells, but are thankfully prefaced by short write-ups (like spells) detailing which powers go under which Modes in which Aptitudes, and a short sentence on what they do. However, I found that the “Big Clump” style was VERY annoying, and this review took much longer to write than normal because I had to reference individual powers alphabetically in some 20 or so pages, rather than being listed by power straight off the bat.
I’m going to review each Aptitude in turn, rather than doing a big clump. Additionally, some Modes have had powers replaced with alternate powers from the Order books. This was a nice little touch, and gives some funky abilities that I’ll mention when they come up.
Biokinesis is broken down into Adaptation, Psychomorphing, and Transmogrify. Adaptation is pretty standard, and useful. I have no big problems with it, because the powers are pretty well balanced. Psychomorphing also is OK, though Redundancy can provide some SERIOUS levels of damage reduction (if you expect that someone’s going to kill you the day after tomorrow, but you’ll be fine for a few days after, and you have, say, 50 power points, why not dump them all into Redundancy? It’ll take 50s hours to manifest, but then you’ll have DR 50/- until you start spending power points, and be sick for 10 minutes per point spend, and 1d3 hours afterwards once you spend them all). Redundancy is relatively broken, but it does provide enough penalties to even it out. Then comes Transmogrify…which is ok up until the 4th level. Using Body Sculpt, your character can turn into just about any monster out of any published d20 supplement so long as it is animal, dragon, fey, giant, humanoid, magical beast, monstrous humanoid, outsider (lawful), plant, reptilian, or vermin. At 14th level the character can go up to Gargantuan size, and at any level using Body Sculpt the character gains all the non-magical abilities of that creature, including, god help me, breath weapons (extraordinary special attacks). This makes the power terribly broken, though it DOES allow Biomorphs to take on Aberrants in hand-to-hand combat, something that was much more difficult in TST. Body Sculpt was pretty versatile in TST, but acted more like Vicissitude (from Vampire: The Masquerade) than the same power in Td20.
Then there is Clairsentience, breaking down into Psychometry, Pyschonavigation, and Telethesia. Clairsentience, overall, is handled very fairly in Td20. It’s a tad more system heavy than TST, but by and large it works pretty much the same.
Following this is Electrokinesis, divided into Electromanipulation, Photokinesis, and Technokinesis. EK retains, at lower levels, the same level of power it used to have. It’s mostly about the utility effects, from playing tricks with computers to controlling the minds of people (because our brains DO run on electricity) to machines. At the higher levels, though, it is by far one of the BEST combat Aptitudes out there, with every single level 4 or 5 power dealing direct damage. PhotoK 4, Laser Generation, is by far one of the nastiest, dealing up to 20d6, while Feedback and Microwave Blast deal damage, plus lower Dexterity and Constitution respectively. However, this gives the shaft to the Legions’ primary combat psionic power of…
…Psychokinesis. In TST, PK didn’t do so well. It was a comparatively weak power with very little utility to it, and very little in the way of useful combat effects. This was quite strange, since the Legions are the setting’s primary military elite, and the first line of defense against the Aberrants. Divided into Cryokinesis, Pyrokinesis, and Telekinesis, PK just doesn’t stack up well against the other powers. Pyrokinetics in Td20 are unable to create fire (the level 3 power, Ignition, was replaced with a power to give you infravision), and are only able to manipulation it at the highest level. Additionally, CryoK 3 and 5, and PyroK 2, are the only ranged direct damage powers. While you can hit someone with a Telekinetically controlled object, the TK5 power, Resonant Interference (which is from Aurora Australis), requires touch (it did in AA, but got you more bang for your buck) and does very little damage, comparatively. CryoK 3, Hypothermic Blast, deals 1d6/2 levels in cold damage, to a maximum of 10d6 (as opposed to the 20d6 in theory provided by high level uses of Photokinesis 5). PyroK 2, Heatburn does even less, dealing 1d8 damage, +1/3 levels (max +6) of non-lethal fire damage. I’m honestly not sure why the writers chose to omit Ignition as the PyroK 3 power, as it seems to make more sense that a Pyrokinetic would be able to start a fire, rather than just see heat, by that level of power (considering that a Photokinetic can do exactly the same thing with a level 2 power).
Telepathy comes next, divided into Empathy, Mindshare, and Psychbending. It’s pretty useful, and powerful, as always, but is heavily hampered by the fact that most of the powers have Displays on them, so while the text describing the Aptitude seems to make it out that Telepathy is virtually invisible, it must mean that most telepaths are trying their damndest not to be caught using their abilities. The only reason I can really think of for this is that in Aberrant, people know when you’re using Telepathy on them unless you specifically buy an Extra called “Surreptitious”. I wonder if the writers were trying to match the two powers up in potency? If so, then Telepathy falls as yet another victim to the attempts of the writers to balance the power levels of Adventure!, Aberrant, and Trinity out, despite the fact that all three games work at extremely different power levels from one another.
Following this is Teleportation. This is a nice touch, as Teleportation wasn’t handled in TST until “Stellar Frontiers”. There was even a Teleporter NPC who showed up an a pre-SF adventure who’s powers were described as “assume she can transport the group wherever they need to go” (I believe she was later give “official” Teleportation Mode scores in Stellar Frontiers). Teleportation is broken down into Translocation, Transmassion, and Warping. Translocation is pretty decent, and easily provides one of the biggest “bang-for-your-buck” level 2 powers: Spatial Hop, which provides line-of-sight personal teleportation (Transmassion can do the same thing at level 2, but with another person). Overall, Teleportation gets a pretty direct conversion, like Clairsentience.
Finally, there is Vitakinesis, divided into Algesis (damage), Iatrosis (healing), and Mentatis (mind stuff). Algesis isn’t the best damage-dealing power in the game, but it does provide a whole slew of nasty little powers, though it doesn’t quite match up to TST standards. The Mode is noticeably lacking two of its signature powers at levels 2 and 4: Contusion (which dealt minor physical trauma), and Lacerate (which ripped people up), which allowed for direct, ranged damage just by looking at someone funny. Algesis 4 and 5 in TST allowed for almost Scanners-esque effects (debatably in Trinity Scanners would have Psychbending, Mindsharing, and Algesis for powers) in which organs in the target exploded (you could make a case for death-by-Morbidity causing someone’s head to explode). In Td20, Algesis 2 allows you to paralyze a target, 4 inflicts a seizure (useful, but not quite as nasty), and Morbidity…Morbidity retains its high level of power, dealing 1d6 direct, permanent ability loss to Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma for every round that it is used. Iatrosis, next, is more or less still as useful as ever, but tends to err a bit more towards the less side. Level 1 is decent, restoring 1d8/4 levels +1/2levels of damage, but the level 3 power, Metabiosis, which allowed for extensive healing (the equivilant to Cure Critical Wounds, really), is absent, and instead replaced by Boost, which temporarily raises the target’s attributes. Finally, Mentatis functions more or less the same, and seems to reflect a lot more of the damn-near-mind-control powers that the Order’s Proxy, Mattheiu Zweidler, tries to use on the PCs in one TST adventure where he appears.
Chapter 13: Technology
The technology chapter is relatively standard. It gives the Wealth system, and deals with the differences between Hard Tech and Bio-Tech. A full weapons list transfer from the TST corebook follows, though noticeably none of the weapons have Critical Hit Threat Ranges. I found this odd, because I would assume that some weapons, like coil guns, would have a much more notably Threat Range than, say, a sonic stunner pistol. Then again, I’ve also just noticed that these do not appear in either Aberrant or Adventure! d20, so it may be a system aspect I’m not aware of. Psi-Enhancers and armor come next, with the psi-enhancing devices work differently (two increase range, one adds a +4 bonus to your Psi for some powers, and one adds an effective 3 character levels for the purposes of psi-power effects per power point spent). Armor isn’t really anything special, though it suggests looking at the d20 Future chapter on mecha for more information on VARGS (which are the power armor of the setting). This is kind of irksome, especially since Td20 isn’t even POWERED by d20 Modern in the first place, so perhaps referring to d20M sourcebooks isn’t the greatest idea. But as I said before with the threat ranges, I may be missing something there. Vehicles also get a write-up, but like the weapons they’re really nothing special aside from the fact that they now class ships by general type rather than model (which was what was done in TST).
Chapter 14: Drama
This chapter starts by suggesting that the GM should think about applying a circumstance bonus to actions by PCs that are really well described. This is immediately followed, for some reason, by rules for Radiation Poisoning (I really think they should have put that one somewhere else).
The Dramatic Editing rules are reduxed over from Adventure! d20, and I think would work better at certain points in Trinity than in Aberrant.
Finally come the transportation and vehicle pursuit rules, which are (once again) taken out of Spycraft. They’re OK, and have been changed a bit to reflect that Trinity is more about space pursuits than driving around London in an Hummer whilst trying to kill James Bond.
Chapter 15: Roleplaying
This is the standard RP chapter. The one notable thing in it is that it provides the 3-4 page “The Story Thus Far” from the TST softcover printing. This short little piece basically details the history behind all the major events in the Trinity Universe, from the real reason the Chitra Bhanu were destroyed, to the reason the Upeo Wa Macho left Earth in the first place. It does not, however, go past the Huang-Mar Conspiracy, which occurred in the Darkness Revealed trilogy of adventures. It does not cover the invasion of Chrome Prime (the Chromatic home world, in “Alien Encounter: Invasion”), the true nature of the Coalition (detailed in “Alien Encounter: Deception”), or the Venezuela Effect (detailed in the official, and last, Trinity e-book “Terra Verde”). This is kind of irksome, some the writers had promised that the book would cover everything up to TV, and thus would be completely up-to-date. All it covers up to, however, is the return of the Upeo Wa Macho (which happened, notably, during the invasion of Chrome Prime, or sometime before, IIRC).
Appendix: Additional Notes
After getting stats for playing sentient apes in Adventure! d20, the fact that the alien (Qin and Chromatic) write-ups in the Appendix are basically just monster stats. The writers had said that they had wanted to make Qin and Chromatics fully playable PCs, so as to open the entire setting up. For whatever reason, they did not, and while both Qin and Chromatic stat blocks receive a paragraph entitled “[race] Characters”, this pargraph is a single sentence for the Qin, and only a few for the Chromatics, and neither have to deal with stats. No stat modifiers or character information is given, just a single monster stat that really falls flat. The Chromatic is definitely supposed to be a warrior, and I think the Qin is a diplomat (even though he only has Diplomacy and Bluff at +1).
The Coalition, notably, do NOT receive stats. While in “Deception” they were written up into 5 or 6 phyles (sub-races), in Td20 they instead receive a single, two paragraph long sidebar stating that they are too numerous to stat out, and further suggesting that the GM simply take something out of the Monster Manual or other monster book (followed by a shameless, bold plug for the Sword & Sorcery written “Creature Collection).
Two Aberrant stat blocks are also given, though both make use of Aberrant rules, so while their powers are explained mechanically, you really need Aberrant d20 to run Aberrants as NPCs (I suppose you could throw together stats from the Monster Manual, though).
After this there are some sample stats for agents from the three divisions of the Aeon Trinity (Neptune, Triton, and Proteus), and short descriptions for the Proxies. The Proxies write ups are brief, and give some insight into the characters. What they do not do, however, is talk about what levels of power Proxies have. While this is somewhat unsurprising (it was until book 1 or 2 of Darkness Revealed that we actually discover what sort of things Proxies Cassel and Zweidler can do [which is just about anything you can think of involving the broad, broad limits of their Aptitude, essentially meaning that they’re basically True Mages when it comes to their Aptitude]), it is disappointing since Adventure! and Aberrant d20 freely gave some suggested powers for their major NPCs.
The book finishes with a two page, font size 8, lexicon of terms taken from the TST corebook. The last, non-OGL agreement page sports a nice picture by Andrew Bates (as did Adventure! d20 and Aberrant d20).
Rating:
I give this book a 3 on Style, as I honestly just don't think its as well designed as the original (partially due to the black and white where there used to be color), but its OK.
I give it a 2 on Substance, as the conversion was awful at points, and many of the conversions just didn't make sense (why remove the ability of pyrokinetics to create fire?).
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