 Goto [ Index ] |
The Angel Director’s Screen accomplishes its goals quite well, and shows an improvement from its Buffy counterpart. Despite this, it suffers from some problems with artwork and layout.
The Screen
The Screen itself is fairly standard for the industry. It’s printed on thin card. This is normal and expected, although perhaps a tiny bit disappointing considering that White Wolf’s new Vampire: the Requiem Screen is printed on sturdier material for a lower price.
Interior
The text on the interior of the screen is black printed over a white or dark cyan background. I found this made the charts a little more difficult to read than the Buffy Director’s Screen, which used a medium blue instead of the cyan to break up the lines.
The charts are numerous and quite clear. I found that the rules for certain combat manoeuvres (Automatic Fire for instance) were actually more clearly explained here than in the rulebook. The Rules Cheat Sheet section also does an admirable job of listing many of the more common situations (about twice as many as the Buffy Screen).
The layout seems a little non-intuitive. As examples: the Magic Table describing spellcasting and the Spell Side Effect table are on opposite ends on the screen. Ranged attack manoeuvres are a pane and a half away from melee attack manoeuvres and the Base Modifiers table is quite a distance from the Success Levels table.
I found that after a session and a half, I knew generally where to look to find the correct chart, but it still involved a bit of searching. This is probably a side effect of being much more exhaustive. The Buffy Director’s Screen included only about 1/2 to 2/3 the information, allowing it to have a more intuitive layout using the same space and making it seem a bit less dense.
Overall, the Screen’s usefulness might have been improved by dropping some of the less referenced tables (i.e. the chart showing distances for high jumps and long jumps) and instead laying out the rest of the information more thematically.
Exterior
The exterior of the screen is also mixed. The artwork on the centre panes depicts the supporting cast imposed over a Los Angeles cityscape. It works quite well and helps set the game’s more serious tone. The left pane is my favourite. It shows Spike in a shadowy elevator (from Wolfram and Hart?) and conveys a great sense of atmosphere.
The right pane is consistent with one of my pet peeves with Eden’s Director’s Screens. The pane doubles as the front of the product and contains the product and line names, a cityscape and the main character. Unfortunately the perspective and placement clash with the neighbouring panes. I would have greatly preferred to have a single sheet of paper slipped in front for the cover (as Wizards of the Coast has done with some of their screens) and had the rightmost pane be more consistent with the rest of the artwork.
The Booklet
As with the Buffy Director’s Screen, the booklet is a ‘coverless’, stapled portfolio. This means that it will likely become damaged in heavy use or being carried around loose in a heavy backpack. I worked around this problem by just sliding it into the portfolio I use to carry spare character sheets and campaign notes. On the plus side, this format is wonderful for photocopying the character sheets since it is very easy to get flat (avoiding distortion) and you don’t need to worry about breaking its binding by doing so.
The bulk of the booklet contains the continuation of the adventure from the Angel Corebook. The adventure is laid out clearly and is well written. Since I haven’t actually had a chance to run this adventure, and I want to avoid giving out too many spoilers, I won’t delve too much into it. Suffice it to say, if you enjoyed the adventure from the Corebook, you’ll most likely like this one as well.
The text and artwork here are solely black and white, although that is expected for this variety of product.
The Angel Director’s Screen disposes with the rather vague and unhelpful storytelling advice from its Buffy counterpart, and replaces it with a collection of very useful charts and tables. These are very handy for character creation, especially for gaming groups with only one copy of the Corebook. It also covers most of the charts that were left of the screen itself such as Life Points and the Strength Table. The Psychometry and Mind Probe charts are also likely to be helpful for saving telepath or psychic characters a bit of page flipping when they use their powers.
Permission was not granted to photocopy these pages, although I’m sure some groups will, in order to save wear and tear on the booklet itself.
Permission was granted to photocopy the last three pages, which include the NPC Quick Sheets and a two page black and white character sheet.
There is a major problem with the NPC Quick Sheets. They include no text or headers, only a blank white oval for a portrait and an empty shaded area where the text is supposed to be. To their credit, Eden has recognized the problem and posted up corrected sheets. I personally however find the Buffy equivalent to be lighter on printer ink and easier to use. Also, the character sheets and references in booklets like this are generally most useful to those without PDF printing (who could just download), making the solution less than ideal.
The character sheet itself is excellent and finally includes the second page with space for some background details. On another positive note, only the first page of the sheet is actually needed for play. All the information is clearly laid out and intuitive and the font is stylish while still easy to read.
Conclusion
Overall the Angel Director’s Screen achieves in its goals of presenting a visual appealing screen that eliminates the need to reference books during play. The main content of the booklet, the adventure, is presented well and seems to be free from errors.
Despite these advantages, some poor choices in design and some printing errors keep this from being a must have product.
You should buy this product if you either: want to continue the adventure from the Corebook, want a quick reference of character creation, or don’t already have the Buffy Director’s Screen.
If you already have the Buffy Director’s Screen, and you don’t plan on using the adventure, there’s probably not enough new here to make the purchase worthwhile.
Otherwise, it will make a useful, albeit unspectacular, addition to your Angel library.
Help support RPGnet by purchasing this item through DriveThruRPG.
