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Super-hero games are enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment, at least partly down to the success of the on-line computer game "City of Heroes" (itself soon to be a roleplaying game, such is our circular world), which is good news for gamers with a bent to wear their undies outside their trousers and spend their time interfering in other people's business. It's a fine time to be a hero, with plenty to choose from between the revitalised "Champions" game and well-received newcomers including "Silver Age Sentinels" and "Mutants & Masterminds," but as the shelves grow crowded with capes a new game is likely to need something special in order to stand out; NE takes a typically Savage approach by turning the genre on its head... to a point.
So, the greatest heroes of Earth have been rather embarrassingly tricked into a colossal tactical snafu and almost all of them have been wiped out by alien invaders. As nations fall to the egregious extra-terrestrials the Earth is in desperate need of super-powered muscle to fight back, but with the heores destroyed or dispersed who is left? Why, your unfriendly neighbourhood Super-villain, of course.
This much you can learn from the cover, and it's the basic premise behind "Necessary Evil." Instead of playing a white hat you get to be the badguy for once. Sounds potentially appealing, but the concept is not without some problems.
Physically this is the best SW supplement yet, a beefy hardback chock full of colour art and sporting a nicely menacing cover showing the head villain's mask looming, uh, villainously out of a dark cityscape. The scene is set for something really nasty, especially given the way that "Savage Worlds" supplements have twisted the tails of familiar settings in the past. The cover also sports more logos than a Formula 1 car, quite impressive given that it's not a licensed product for someone else's game. Inside the good impressions are reinforced with a frequent (but not space-filling) use of quality art from the likes of Storn, well known to "Champions" players. Here the pictures are colour and have just the sort of bold style needed to convey the comicbook setting. There's no sense of randomly recycled art used to pad the book out, either. Editing is mostly good, despite evidence that someone has been using a computer spellchecker without supervision. Hmm, maybe if they had Super Vision they wouldn't need extra proofreading.
As well as general illustrations the book is well endowed in the map department, with plenty of clear, computer drawn maps accompanying the adventures, as well as a rather charming two page spread of "Generic Villain Hide Out Maps." perfect for the villain who likes to catalogue shop. The chief location of Star City, an artificial island home to most of the world's supers, is treated to a lovely full page colour map that looks almost like a satellite photograph. What a pity the absence of any actual locations, other than the names of the star points, makes it entirely superfluous. After all, telling us that the city is an eight-pointed star gives us almost all of the information shown on the map, but none of the key locations featured in the adventures are included. If it's not a mistake then it's certainly a missed opportunity. As is the norm in colour games these days the pages have been treated to a colour background, in this case a pale cityscape which thankfully does not obscure the text but does make it look as though you've been hurriedly wiping spilt tea from the page.
There is a decent, although hardly exhaustive, index and the contents page nicely presents the upcoming goodies; between them you should be able to navigate this volume without trouble. NE continues the SW style of providing books that are half rules and setting supplements and half adventure. The rules here are solid and clearly presented, with brief advice on concept, example character types (these are particularly well illustrated) and new Edges and Hindrances appropriate to the genre. Expect any fans of the Blackadder series to start chuckling the moment they see the hindrance "Gloater," mind you, but on the whole these are well designed and in keeping with the flavour of the main rulebook. Knockback, something of an essential to re-creating those downtown destruction derbies from the comics, is addressed, along with new gear and vehicles. All very nice, and SW fans will pounce on this stuff gleefully. The real treat, however, follows: Powers.
Putting the Super into Super-villain, Powers are key to making a character suitable for this setting, and the authors have gone for the tried and tested list of options approach. Pay your points, take your power. It's a nicely extensive list and the inclusion of suggested "Trappings" such as "Cold stare, horrible visage, dark cowl" for the "Fear" power give the players ways to avoid a situation where two characters with the same power seem like the same person. There are different levels and combinations available and the use of Powers does not muck around with the fundamental speed and ease of the "Savage Worlds" game, which is much of the appeal of this particular set of rules, of course. If you need further details on how those rules function then you will find several reviews of the basic game on RPGnet.
Star City gets a fair overview in Chapter Four, listing some locations and important characters, but anyone used to the likes of Hero Games' "Hudson City" will find this pretty thin stuff. As a basis for the adventures included in the book it is a good start, but trying to pack specific locations and NPCs for an ongoing campaign into fourteen profusely illustrated large-type pages inevitably means that depth is the first thing sacrificed. "Savage Worlds" seems pitched very much at the short campaign or even single adventure, and from that point of view the setting is adequate if the GM doesn't mind adding a lot of flavour and detail himself. Players of other Super-hero RPGs will find little here to plunder.
And then we're onto the adventures, starting with the "Adventure Generator" and the detailed individual adventures which together make up the campaign arc. Without wishing to spoil anything for potential players these are mostly entertaining episodes leading from the tricky task of getting a bunch of villains to work together right through to that messy business of saving the planet. The villains likely find themselves part of the resistance organised by Dr. Destruction, biggest bad-boy on the planet, and at times the adventures seem almost more like espionage scenarios in a comicbook setting due to the fact that resistance cells are kept in ignorance of each other for security reasons. An inventive GM will be able to expand on this idea quite happily.
"Champions" players might find themselves wondering if the authors of this supplement weren't having a bit of a dig at the Grand Old Game. Firstly we have illustrations from Champ's favourite Storn, then a villain named Dr. Destruction... and then to round it off the Earth's greatest hero, who happens to be named Champion, is soundly drubbed before the game even gets started. Coincidence, surely.
So where does "Necessary Evil" stand in the lineup of Super-games? For existing SW players it's an excellent supplement, allowing any sort of comicbook scenario you like once the initial adventures have been played out. The need for the main rulebook as well makes it a fairly expensive option for anyone simply looking for a new Super-hero RPG, although presentation stands up well against "Mutants & Masterminds" and makes "Champions" look positively frumpy. For content, however, this supplement falls short as a stand-alone supers game. The Powers rules are good and delightfully simple to use, but stand them alongside "Champions" and it's obvious that NE is necessarily limited; it simply cannot deliver the massive range of options and complete control beloved of that game's fans. To be fair, it doesn't try to, and in itself it does a creditable job of adapting the highly entertaining "Savage Worlds" game to four-colour fun. But it's not perfect.
There's that name... "Necessary Evil." Evil... pretty strong stuff. And yet "Necessary Naughtiness" might be more appropriate, because the most intriguing feature of this setting is also its least explored. The characters are villains, not standard heroic types. They have their own agendas, and the only reason they are likely to band together is for personal advantage; in this case saving the planet obviously has benefits for everyone. The complexities of running a team of Super-villains should not be underestimated, because if your players are doing a good job then each character should be believable and acting true to himself, which means that everyone is essentially looking for their own chance. It's a tricky proposition to maintain a group dynamic without having these so-called villains simply turn into heroes with a dubious track record. This is addressed very briefly in the book, and the character examples nicely touch on the fact that not everyone needs to have been a big league badguy, but a good group could have tremendous fun with this concept, and "Necessary Evil" sells itself short. Some of the powers are ones that your average Joe Super-hero wouldn't choose, such as the thoroughly revolting "Decay," and there are reminders about being evil - although not too evil - in the text, yet a solid look at the whole idea is missing, and that's a pity. One thing I can announce as missing and be happy about it, though, is that bloody grinning jester, whose tiresome prattle is thankfully absent from this book.
At $29.99 the book is not cheap, and there's no pressing reason for it not to be a paperback. Production values are quite high, which might alleviate the damage to the wallet for some. The decision to mix extensive adventures into a supplement, common to this whole line, might be controversial, and certainly if you don't fancy running the story arc you'll find that half the book is of limited use to you, but the adventures are decent, lightweight fare and worth a look.
"Savage Worlds" is shaping up into a nice line of skewed settings which has so far avoided swamping the benefits of the core system under a heap of clunky additional rules. Savage Supers play just as smoothly as anything in the game and this supplement will be greeted warmly by those looking for speed and colour over depth and a wealth of options. If you lean toward that second group then "Necessary Evil" might not be so necessary after all.
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