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The name’s Davenport. I review games.So the other day, my good buddy Angel was back in the office. Took me a while to figure out exactly why he was back, seein’ as how he needed some time to stare out the window and brood.
“This is it,” he finally says.
“What is?” I says, hopin’ the world wasn’t comin’ to an end. Again.
“This,” he says, handin’ me the Angel Director’s Screen.
“Huh,” I says, givin’ it the once-over. “Nice lookin’ screen. Good art, plenty of info, easy read… But what makes it ‘it’?”
“The last product in my game line,” he says. “Eden lost the license. This is all I get. The corebook, and one lousy GM screen.”
“Doesn’t look like such a lousy screen to me…” I says.
“So not the point,” he says. “Buffy gets a rulebook, a screen, a players’ book, a magic book, and a monster book. Me? A rulebook and a screen. End of story. You want to tell me how that’s fair? My series even went on longer than hers! Shouldn’t that count for something?”
“Your show started after hers…”
“Can you believe how much I don’t care?” he says.
Sheesh. The guy’s moodiness was puttin’ in overtime.
“Look,” I says, “Yeah, it’s a bum steer losin’ your game. But hey, look at it this way: I said your game’s got more uses than hers does, right?”
“Yeah...” he says.
“And if it’s got more uses than hers, yours is liable to see more use, right?”
“Yeah...”
“So who cares if she got more supplements? You’ll get more use! Especially since people can use her supplements with your game anyway! Hell, I know I do.”
“Okay, okay, you’re right," he admits. “I shouldn’t be feeling sorry for myself.” (Which was funny, ’cause I kinda thought that was his whole schtick.) “Maybe I’m just still smarting over that whole thing with Buffy and that ‘Immortal’ guy.”
“You... don’t read the comics much, do you?” I says.
“Uh, no. Saving the world’s kinda put my comic book reading on the back burner. Why?”
“Oh, nothing...” I says.
I may be hard-boiled, but I don’t do spoilers.
Substance
The Screen
The interior of the screen includes all of the following:
Turn Order Additional Actions Combo Table Ranged Attack Chart Spell Side Effect Table Fear Test Modifiers Chart Armor Table Panic Table Base Damage Table Injury Table Base Modifiers Table Rules Cheat Sheet Breaking Stuff Table Tossed Item Chart Drama Points Usage Chart Combat Maneuvers Reference Table Jump Table Magic Table Success Levels Table
Playtest: I’ve run many a game without ever cracking open my Angel corebook thanks to this screen, and when I have needed to use the book, it’s usually been to follow one of the handy page references by one of the entries to get more details. I can’t ask anything more from a GM screen than that.
The Booklet
Style
This is not a GM screen booklet in the mood to screw around. GM advice and the like is all well and good, but this author knows full well that the adventure in the core rulebook left the group hanging. It’s time to skip the preliminaries and get right to the big payoff.
Blood Brothers, Part TwoThis being a GM screen and all, I feel safe in dispensing with the spoiler text.
When we last left our heroes, they’d just been screwed over by a bit of GM fiat, losing Janine D’Angelo the prophecy-making girl to the demonic Doppelganger of one of the PCs in the middle of a three-way battle between the heroes, the demon thugs send by the Lyrok clan, and Wolfram & Hart commandos.
From there, the heroes can try working through any number of channels to figure out where the Doppelganger has taken Janine. Regrettably, none of these will turn up much more than a few crumbs of information, none of them going very far to solve the puzzle. It’s not until the Doppelganger coerces Janine into a trial run of her insta-prophecy power – turning the sky over L.A. blood-red for about 15 minutes – that the heroes get their first real break: characters with Psychic Vision and the Doppelganger’s “sibling” all get to see Janine, hypnotized by a demon, mouthing the words of the red sky prophecy in a vacant church.
If they blow their chance at recognizing the church interior for what it is, they might do so by exploiting the link between the Doppelganger and its sibling to see through the Doppelganger’s eyes. Or, if they recognize the breed of the demon hypnotizing Janine in the vision and if they can track down the local hideout of these demons and if they can track the Doppelganger after beating the demons into submission and learning that the Doppelganger hired their leader and left through the sewers, they can also find the Doppelganger’s hideout.
To spice things up, the text offers several red herrings to throw at the PCs in their searching, as well as an attack by a seductive but deadly female Oden Tal demon assassin.
When they find the Doppelganger, he’s in the process of opening a gate home and destroying the world. (You know the drill.) He’s gotten a power boost from the ceremony allowing him to heal at an alarming rate and has the leader of those hypno-demons with him. If that’s not enough opposition, even more demon thugs and Wolfram & Hart commandos can bust in for yet another three-way battle.
Playtest: There’s one big, big problem here, though. The Doppelganger magically wards his church hideout from wide-ranging mystic searches, but if the PCs start mystically scrying specific churches, the ward will show the church in question as “not there” when it obviously is – the equivalent a huge red sign in the yard reading “NO DOPPELGANGERS HERE!” In my case, the PCs did recognize the place in the vision as a church and immediately went the mystic search route. To stretch out the adventure just a wee bit, I had the spell take long enough to cast for the group to have time to follow up on the hypno-demon hideout lead. But honestly? They could have gone straight to the church.
(I did throw in a whimsical encounter with a friendly sewer-cleaning Shoggoth of my own design, however.)
The climactic fight in the church wasn’t particularly climactic, either. I couldn’t bring myself to throw in the demon goons and the Wolfram & Hart commandos again, especially since I got the impression that the players found the three-way fight a little tiresome the first time around. But given the devastating nature of gang-ups combined with offensive Drama Points, I had a pretty good idea that the Doppelganger’s new rapid-healing powers would just serve to drag out the combat and delay the inevitable.
Thankfully, the adventure offers several ways for the PCs to save the day, one of which involves a rather cool struggle of wills between the Doppelganger and its “twin,” merging the two into one body and forcing them to fight for ownership of it. This option, chosen by my players, had the advantages of avoiding a protracted and largely pointless combat, leaving the final victor of the contest at least somewhat in doubt, and giving the character the chance to pick up some demonic abilities that she did not initially possess. Of course, this option also meant that the other PCs didn’t have much to do other than take care of the demon leader and cheer their friend on, although one telepathic character was able to join the mental fray more directly.
In a more general sense, the importance of a single character to this adventure means that the GM had better be pretty darn sure of the dependability of that character’s player. In my case, the player of the original duplicated character dropped out of the game, requiring me to retcon the subject of the Doppelganger.
In an even more general sense, the adventure as a whole still doesn’t feel like a very good choice for brand new characters, which is pretty much what I’d expect from an adventure in a GM screen that’s the second part of an adventure in a core rulebook. Not only does it require the GM to continue to work up a plausible “evil twin” personality for a character likely just introduced, but it now includes the very strong likelihood that the character in question will undergo a transformation into a supernatural (or more-supernatural) being.
Game AidsJust about every table from the core rulebook not on the screen itself finds its way into the included booklet:
Character Creation Process Character Type Chart Life Point Table Jump Table Strength Table The Meaning of Attribute Numbers The Meaning of Skill Numbers Qualities and Drawbacks List by Name Addiction Point Value Table Ranks Table Psychometry Chart Mind Probe Chart Muscle Score Table Brains Score Table Combat Maneuvers Reference Table Base Damage Table Success Levels Table Angel NPC Quick Sheets Angel Character Sheet
Playtest: Just as I’ve run games using the screen almost exclusively, I’ve created characters using these tables almost exclusively.
The screen exterior is absolutely gorgeous. You can see for yourself here assuming the image is still up when you read this review. Just in case it isn’t, I’ll just tell you that the front features a brooding Angel looming over the benighted (naturally) LA skyline, the ghostly face of his evil alter-ego Angelus lurking in the background; the center two panels show Fred, Gunn, Wesley, Lorne, and Cordelia over the LA cityscape; and the back panel presents Spike at his Billy Idol best in or next to an elevator.
The screen interior presents the information in black on a white background with gun metal blue highlights. The color scheme combined with the judicious use of white space results in a screen that’s jam-packed with information yet easy to read at a glance. The screen interior uses black text on a light gray background, again with plenty of white space. (Or light gray space, as the case may be.)
As for the writing? Hey, it’s C.J. Carella. I may not be wild about the content of the adventure, but the man knows how to write in the voice of the Buffyverse.
I didn’t notice any errors, and as of this writing there’s only one listed on the web site errata.
Conclusion
As should be obvious, I can’t bring myself to recommend this product for the adventure. Of course, if you’ve already started your group on the first part of the adventure in the core rulebook, the only other option is writing up “What Happens Next” yourself.
But really, if you’re buying a GM screen just for the adventure, you really ought to take a good, hard look at your purchasing habits, sez I. Purchased for what it is, the Angel GM screen, like the Angel corebook, outperforms its Buffy counterpart. Almost everything you need to run the game beyond character stats and witty dialogue is on the screen. And if it’s not on the screen, it’s in the booklet. And if it’s not in the booklet, the screen or the booklet will tell you where to find it in the rulebook.
If it seems like I dedicated an inordinate amount of space in this review to the least important aspect of the product, well, that’s only because there’s only so much to say about such a utilitarian product that does exactly what it’s supposed to do. In short, this is as good as GM screens get.
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