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Unfortunately, ‘Shades of Empire’ does not seem to have thought it necessary to really include any mistakes, contradictions or general naffness, so unless we want to spend hours ranting about the unfortunate layout issue on page 6, we may have the venture into the presumably painful and unfamiliar worlds of discussing something positive. Fortunately, in this regard, ‘Shades of Empire’ has much to its credit. The basis of the book is 9 organisations, each split into player information and GM information. The latter always includes at least one sample NPC, some form of base or other building and three or more plot ideas. This is a thorough treatment of each group, and has a lot of material that as a GM you can simply pick up the book and slot straight into your game. Each of the nine groups is different and offers scope for different type of play.
The Altdorf Dockers is one of two groups that draw upon the novel ‘Beasts in Velvet’ for much of the material. Any Altdorf game featuring such Iconic Landmarks as the Street of a Thousand Taverns, Three Tolls Bridge or the Mermaid is going to find this section very useful. In particular GMs running Dave Allen’s excellent ‘Luitpoldstrasse Blues’ scenario will find much here to help them expand it.
The Brothers of Handrich develops the role of the God of Commerce by creating a secret society in its employ. Operating as a kind of a mix between the Oddfellows and a Thieves’ Guild, this is essentially a Chaos Cult without the chaos. If you need an organised group to act as support or as an antagonist, and are fed up of rolling out the Purple Hand, these may well neatly fill that void.
The Dreamwalkers of Morr are bands of adventurers who follow prophets of Morr. This is a concept that could have gone horribly wrong and D&Desk, but I think they pull it off. Far more is made of the internal politics of the Cult of Morr and the lunacy of following someone who told you he dreamt that vampires are over there than actually combating said Undead. If you like added rules, this section reprints a spell from Tome of Salvation, adds a new Talent that any PC can buy and adds an entirely new spell.
The Glorious Revolution of the People is the second of the Chapters set in Altdorf and draws even more heavily on ‘Beasts in Velvet’. This is an oft cynical look at the idea of popular revolution in Altdorf, and the emergence of the printing press. While on the whole the chapter is very good, it does contain my second quibble with the book, as the example Printing Press described seems more in tune with the kind of thing created by Lord Stanhope or Koenig in the early 1800s than say the Guttenberg Press. The second organisation to include rules, this time the Pamphleteer Advanced Career, essentially a career for a newssheet editor.
The Hedgefolk are a quasi-religious bunch of Hedge Wizards, standing somewhat between village wise women/men and Druids. This chapter fills an oft-felt hole in the WFRP system, that of the wizards who worked magic before the foundation of the Collages. This task it performs admirably, adding a whole slew of possible archetypes. This is the heaviest chapter in terms of new rules. Three Careers, 16 spells and some associated talents. Some of the rules here could have done with being double-checked, everything is usable, but not as well defined as I would have liked. Overall, a worthy edition, and what I suspect will be the big draw of the book most people.
I however, am not most people, and to me the big draw of the book was pictured on the cover. The Imperial Navy. I could rant about how good this chapter is for hours, I honestly and absolutely believe the author nailed it perfectly. The politics, the details, the secret GM politics and details. It is absolutely spot on. If you are interested in running a Naval Campaign, then you need to get this book. If I was forced at gunpoint to quibble with it, the only misstep I think the author made is slightly overrating the Empire’s Ships, as I would place Greatships at first to fifth, Wolfships at forth to fifth and I would not rate most Wargalleys at all. Rules wise the section adds a new career, the Admiral, which seems to offer a good alternative to Sea Captain if you want your Noble Lord to be nautically competent… but not that nautically competent.
The Knights of Magritta are a secret society of knights, drawing equally from myth about the Knight’s Templar and Knights Hospitalar. If you want your game to go down the Dan Brown route, these are clearly the lads to role out, functioning as another great alternate Chaos Cult without the chaos. The group is well detailed, covering its structure and politics and has to me the best-detailed building in the book. It also adds a new basic career, the Cadet, an officer in training. Anther thing of note is that as this organisation is principally based in Nuln, Carcassonne and Lucinni, it offers a lot of possibility for international travel and politics.
The Quinsberry Lodge is perhaps best described as a kind of Halfling Freemasonry, responsible for making sure very Halfling gets a fair slice of the pie with regard to the humans. If you have a Halfling in your game, or fancy using Halflings as antagonists this should be useful material. There is nothing really new here apart from the name, but it does provide structure to hang all your Halfling plot together on.
The Roadwardens section takes a single career, and gives the full monty of write ups. Everything you wanted to know about the Empire’s Roadwardens is included here, jurisdiction, operations, politics. As with the Quinsberry Lodge, this is not really new or ground breaking material. However, it should be very useful if your have Roadwarden PCs or even fancy using one or two as Antagonists.
In general, the book is well produced. One really nice detail is careers have returned to the traditional layout rather than the annoying layout in Realms of the Ice Queen. NPC profiles however are still in the annoying layout used in RotIQ and TTT, where you have to struggle to find there Attacks and Wounds buried in the middle of it. Trappings for NPC profiles alternated between nice easy to read lists and annoyingly hard to use descriptions. Hopefully these issues will be fixed in the next volume. All in all, I thought this was a very impressive book, up there in terms of quality and usefulness with the likes of Tome of Salvation, despite being much smaller.
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