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...highschool being the perfect choice, then.
Welcome to The Smallville Highschool Yearbook, the first supplement for the Smallville roleplaying game. As the title implies, the book is designed and laid-out to look like a Yearbook (complete with slightly twee autograph page and letter from old alumnus Lois Lane). Said yearbook of course comes from the eponymous highschool featured in the first four seasons of the TV show. Thus the book does dual duty – as a setting sourcebook for the first four series of the show, and as a discussion of the highschool genre in general.
To its quality in the former regard I can offer little insight, since I never watched the show and know nothing about it. The show, as always, is a small part of the game's scope and appeal. That said, this seems an excellent sourcebook as far as I can tell. The fourth chapter contains a detailed description of all the major set locations of the early episodes, with a list of their typical Specialties and what Extras or Leads you might find there. This greatly expands on the list in the corebook, and goes into more detail and depth since it only has four seasons to deal with instead of ten. The same goes for the character roster that follows: we get full Lead sheets for Clark, Lana, Lois, Lex, Chloe, Pete, Lionel Luthor, Ma and Pa Kent, Jason and Whitney, statted up as they were in series four (ie in full high-school mode, with different concerns and abilities).
What’s impressive about both sections is not so much the attention to detail but the focus on utility and narrative purpose. Each location, for example, discusses the kind of scenes the location is best suited for, and I don’t just mean “social scenes often happen at the coffee shop”, but also quick thoughts on the metaphorical and visual language of the settings and how to use them, along with examples of who would be found there, and why, and what sort of dice the location might provide. Also included is a long list of sample generic locations as well, the kind of things that never got a huge feel to them or lack a particular name, but could still come up in any Smallville game or indeed any highschool game (eg Corridor, Teacher’s Lounge, Parking Lot, Flagpole etc). Likewise the Lead stats are followed with a long list of typical highschool Extras from the Custodian to the Guy With a Car to Mom and Dad. These lists are really important to help players understand how Extras can work, what kind of Specialities they give and give them ideas for generating their own Extras with their own Specialities. It also provides a quick list for Watchtowers needing to populate a scene or add Resources to a Feature.
Speaking of Features, let's turn to Chapter Two. As I said, it's kind of like a monster manual, only for highschool. As mentioned, the NPCs you'll be using in your typical game of Smallville will be Wedges designed to cause drama between your Leads, and will be designed therefor, but if your game is set in highschool, you can be sure they will fit into certain groups, types and archetypes. They might be staff or students of a certain faculty, members of a club, social group or sports team, or part of a social clique. The book lists 31 of these Cliques, fully statted out as Features. Usually we think of Features (and indeed Extras) as being a single person but for the purposes of story, they can just as easily be “The Chess Team” or “Those Guys Who Beat Me Up After School”.
Now, there is an issue here perhaps of too much detail; that is to say, does it really matter that the Math Club care about Truth but the Robot Club care about Glory? That's somewhat fair, especially in a game like Smallville, where there is little need to balance challenging mechanical encounters. Yet we still need monster manuals for other reasons – so we can GM on the fly, with minimal effort. This is especially true in Smallville, where anyone can spend a Plot Point to gain a Relationship with anyone in a scene (or who could be likely be expected to be in a scene). Hell, with an extra Plot Point you can bring anyone into a scene, so the GM may suddenly be faced with the Chess Team turning up on top of Mt Everest. So while it might be obvious that the Chess Team probably has Duty Chess is a harsh mistress d10 and Clark Kent is a musclebound jock d6, having a page to turn to would certainly be helpful to many.
If I sound defensive, it's because I am – I'm still not entirely convinced of the value of this book. Smallville is a game that's easy to fudge as a GM, and NPCs that aren't wired in to the Leads just don't matter that much. There's also the fact that everyone knows what a highschool is like. This means that we also don't need the monster summary that accompanies the stats. We don't need it ... but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. I don't care how multifaceted you were at highschool, there's going to be some part of the curriculum you never experienced, and of course, it is all filtered through the world of American television drama. For me, the eye-opener was the sport section. Not only was it something I had no experience with in real life, I also had no experience with it in drama. (Heck, probably the reason I always preferred Buffy to Smallville is that Buffy's protagonists were all outcasts and geeks while Smallville's heroes were much more the jocks, preppies and A-crowd.) With football being a big part of both the show and the school, it receives a large and in-depth discussion in the rules, and such was the quality of it, it convinced me that having sports as a focus of a high-school game would produce a powerful, dramatic and interesting campaign, and one I was keen to run.
Making sure you don't miss any more subtle angles of school life is the job of the third chapter, which delves into aspects of running highschool games. It comes at this subject in a variety of ways. First off it looks at highschool in different time periods and settings, then it looks at the important dynamics of school life, and of adolescence. There is a list of key milestones and events to make sure you haven't forgotten any and even a brief discussion of psychological development. There is also a random Situation Generator for developing schoolyard angst. It's not the greatest engine but like everything in this chapter, it's handy to have.
The only chapter I haven't described is the first, which has perhaps the most rules meat. It kicks off with four new lifepath steps with a more highschool feel, focussing on parents, goals and attitudes. Then we get a dozen new Distinctions with a highschool feel, followed by several more named after yearbook style prizes, such as Cutest Couple or Most Likely to Succeed. The gimmick here is that the award you receive is chosen by the other players (not unlike the way Distinctions are chosen for you by others in Leverage). It's a clever twist that encourages group cohesiveness, focusses on the practicality of play (as opposed to the theory of chargen) and also has a nice highschool feel since the judgement of your peers becomes all-important.
It's not the only buried treasure in the rules. The Clique design rules are also an excellent basis for designing any Feature without going down the pathway chart, and the TV show character sheet section contains several clever ideas for adding new Leads, starting without all relationships defined and other twists on the character network. This is partly a problem with layout – not everything was quite where I thought it would be, and there is a constant mix between show-specific information and generic information, and rules and setting bundled together. There may be no way to avoid this (I'm not sure where it all belonged), but it left the product feeling ultimately unclear.
Perhaps it was an issue of focus – some of the advice really belonged in the corebook, or would more properly fit in the upcoming Watchtower Guide. Or perhaps it was simply that a lot of the content didn't seem extraordinarily important or particularly brilliant, so that the real nuggets of useful information seemed more out of place. The truth is, I'm not quite sure. Something wasn't quite there, but I can't say exactly what.
This is a good book. At times, it's an excellent book. Other times, howerver, there's some filler, some chaff with the wheat. The information a bit too obvious, the discussions not deep enough, the ideas not sparking off the page. It is also a narrow book. If you're not using Smallville High, it has a bunch of stuff you won't need; if you're not using a highschool at all it will be of limited use, if any. Of course, that makes sense – it never claims to be anything but what the title implies – but there are some supplements that have transcended their obvious purposes.
Maybe I'm spoiled. The corebook was so much more than just a Smallville roleplaying game, so now I expect that from the supplements. This book contains a very solid examination of the highschool years of the television show and highschool shows in general, and some clever, elegant, well-tailored mechanics to make your game much more reflective of that highschool setting, along with an enormous monster manual and NPC roster of all the folks you might want to meet there. On top of this there are a few clever ideas, insightful discussions and helpful hints. If you're running any kind of highschool game, this will prove extremely useful indeed.
I'm just not sure they needed quite so many pages to accomplish that. It does the job, but it never quite excels beyond it. It definitely makes the grade, even gets an A – but just misses out on the honours list.
Substance: 4 Style: 4
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