A$35 soft back book with black and white art, and art ranging from decent to pretty good, may not sound like the manual that you need for your gaming library, but in this case it’s not about the gravy it’s all about the meat! First off I think it’s important to point out that this book was not intended for use with the 3.5 player’s handbook, but rather the d20 Modern rulebook. Why is this important? Because it means that the rules are built around a slightly different version of d20 than most, and even uses rules such as reputation and talent trees, which are nowhere to be found in a D&D PHB. This is a good start as it builds upon WOTC’s attempts to make the system more universal rather than making you look up charts for abilities that mention how many spells you can have or equipment weights for gear you mafia character will never use (how many wiseguys you know who carry a +2 Lance?)

Mafia Starts of in a rather informal tone with a mascot character called Mr. D. who explains da Mafia to you in broad strokes to start, and gives the book a bit of Goodfellas / Sopranos type character from the start. It also starts with a basic history of the Mafia from the Sicilian resistance of the French in 1282, up to present day, now this first chapter is a gloss over of history but later chapters give you quite a bit to work on in building a campaign in any era of the mafia as we know it. (Hey maybe I was wrong maybe one o’ dem 1282 wiseguys might have needed a +2 lance, my bad). The book goes on to talk about character classes, starting with advanced character classes (which are prestige classes) and Basic classes, (Which are very similar to the base classes in d20 Modern). One obvious change is the lack of time one spends in a basic class, Mafia tend to multiclass a bit more and most basic classes only last about 5 levels. Which again is a change made to fit the genre, something I am glad to see becoming a bigger trend in d20. They also touch briefly on other organized crime models (such as the Yakuza, rap gangers, and the Russian mob) but this isn’t flushed out too much being again that this product is mostly meant to be very much about the Italian mob.

Next we go into a word about character creation. The biggest change here is the rules about family, Generating a family is a rather important step in this game, which makes a lot of sense considering the importance of blood and tradition to the mafia (watch the Godfather trilogy if you don’t believe me!) This step is actually really cool because it not only works in some ways like the old cyberpunk life path, to flesh out your character, but it also works to give your character a bit more standing, and can effect the game in many ways (after all only a pure blood Sicilian can be a made man.) After a section on skills and feats, (most of which is old hat, with a few genre specific gems, like golden boy) there is a Section on weaknesses. Every character has one, and this also works to flesh out your character with a really playable hindrance that is more likely to cause opportunities for real roleplaying than simply penalize your movement, or ability to act in game. The next section is a great chapter on mafia life, which explains the rules for respect. Respect kind of works in an odd way like Honor in L5R, but rather than making your hero more heroic, it simply means you are more trusted within the family structure and are more likely to raise in rank in your crew.

We then go into Sections on Equipment vehicles and combat which while all very ell fleshed out are in many ways redundancies due to the commonality of much of this in the d20 modern rulebook. While I am tempted to complain about this the book still has plenty of meat, making this more of a convenience for those who don’t want to reference back to the d20 Modern book than a waste of valuable space, Honestly more companies could learn from Mr. D’s insistence on filling the book with crunch and meat rather than expansive and pretty layouts and full color prettiness.

The next section alone is well worth the price of admission, the schemes section is a full set of rules for how to run a mafia in a gaming perspective, each scheme breaks down into payoff and difficulties that allow you to mesh them seamlessly into your campaign. This section made me think a lot of great mafia video, like the Sopranos, where opportunities for new ventures seem to pop up for enterprising young Turks, but can also become more trouble than they are worth. Next we move on to sections covering security and surveillance, which are useful and give you plenty of good ideas for running on the other side of the law. It would seem pretty easy to run a cop campaign and use this stuff to make a great mafia NPC enemy force to deal with. Also a Short chapter on court proceedings, a decent and quick chart driven system that pretty much makes running what happens if you get caught pretty interesting.

The next section however is the one that blew me a way the mafia life section includes a hefty dictionary of mafia slang, not to mention a very detailed time line of the mafia from 493, to present day, The campaign section goes into pretty detailed info on their core campaign ideas, including the 1282 Mafia, and the modern day campaign set in the fictional New Milan. Plenty of good ideas, but I think the concept of using a fictional city seems a bit after trying to stay so close to reality up till here. While I can see why them have gone this road, and it’s probably a great place to start for a less experienced gamer, but Personally I am thinking more about getting a Newark NJ, or NYC map, and plotting out my own locals within a very real city.

In short this book has decent production values but nothing compared with say d20 future or the latest Ebberon release, but then again this book is far more fact than fluff which makes it a solid entry into any gamer’s library, I would say it is about as good a source on the Mafia as GURPS Space is a source for hard science fiction. Whether you are someone who runs nothing but d20 or boycotted your favorite game because they went dual stats on one supplement, this book is a great guide to running a modern game based around organized crime. So go out and get it or expect to be sleepin with the fishes!

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