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It is, therefore, a grab-bag, a mixture of elements, which means not everything in here will interest everyone. MWP might have been served, I feel, by putting out a setting specific book, with all the episode guides and all the NPC write-ups in one book, and all the rules and game advice in another. This is especially true as the GM material is itself a grab-bag: in the style of the old Player’s Options rules for AD&D, for every rule there are five different alternatives offered, and you’re bound to hate four of them. However, in this mixed bag approach there is strength as well as weakness: there’s bound to be something in here you didn’t expect would interest you, but does.
The book is broken up into seven sections, not including the introduction and the fun foreword by Justing “Green Arrow” Hartley). The last section, the appendix, contains the aforementioned episode guide and NPC update, which is exhaustively researched and staggeringly voluminous, and even includes stat updates for the Lead sheets from the corebook, should your game feature the post-series-10 leads.
Each of the remaining six sections – the meat of the book sandwich - focuses on one part of the core rules, and how to expand them. Interleaved between each of those chunky rules patties are six delicious cheese slices of setting information, aka the monster manual, broken down by the bad guy’s “origin” or current location, be that Level 33.1 or the Belle Reve Sanitarium.
Collectively, these contain 42 different NPC write-ups, with full stats, detailed backgrounds and advice on how to use each one in your game (and there are 18 more from series 10 in the appendix). Granted, some of them are dead or de-powered, but few people stay down in the comic universe. A more pressing problem is they can be rather specific to the show, in that they were designed explicitly to be foils and wedges for the show’s Leads. Not only does this mean their stats are not always directly applicable (who cares if they have a relationship to Lois unless your show is VERY derivative?) it may mean their whole conception may be less than useful. However, if you want to see how the system works in action at modelling your favourite episode, the detail will be appreciated. There’s also plenty of useful information in the Assets chosen (especially if you want to give the power of that guy in episode X to one of your guys) and examining the Relationships they do have may help you mimic the wedge creation of the show.
They make up for the specific through the general: by including a full background on the “sources” of these groups, expounding on such things as the history of the Veritas Society, the things still stored in Black Creek and all the science behind Project Ares, Mercury and Scion. Again, some of this won’t be very useful – your show might not even have a freaky secret society of rich guys, let alone that particular one – but the exhaustive detail means that somewhere along the line a section will expand upon something that caught your eye but the show didn’t develop – which is, of course, the whole point of licensed roleplaying. Think they should have taken power/villain X in episode Y and seen where it led? Or remembered it when they dealt with problem Z? The writers of this sourcebook agree, and have given you the tools to answer those questions as awesomely as possible.
The new characters include such comic luminaries as Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Superboy, Mr Mxyzptlk and Bizarro, some familiar types who can turn into sand or drain powers or slay vampires but certainly aren’t infringing on other media properties, and a few extra weird things like the goddess Isis and insane grannies. Even if you’ve never seen the show you may still find something useful in the sheer volume and depth of material, if only how to model whatever power your PCs are after. The stats also provide some examples, for smaller characters, of the “Minor Feature” design rules included elsewhere in the book.
So speaking of that, let’s move onto looking at those... For a book full of rules, the first chapter perhaps shouldn’t have been what it is. Its focus is on antagonitsts, but kicks off with a in-depth discussion of what makes a good villain and how to express that. The game advice is fine, but it feels wrong to kick off the book with something so ephemeral . Obviously, villains are a big theme of the book and you want to discuss the streamlined stat-lines before the first NPC list, but I think it feels better if the rules come first, especially in a book like this where so much of the focus is on rules options as opposed to GM guidelines.
The shortened stat-line boils down to picking only two or three Values, a few simple Relationships and a few Assets, and then bolting on extra dice for “Depth” depending on how much you intend to use them. While the advice for what to pick is useful, the system is very vague and not much quicker. It is nice for the rules to officially say “it’s okay not to fill in the whole character sheet” but we could have figured out on our own.
Then we switch tempo completely – from fairly obvious and small changes into ways to rewrite the game from the ground up. Namely, by messing around with the character generation pathways. After laying out how many advances characters need to get for each of three campaign levels, the rules provide a helpful guide to breaking those levels up into stages, and divvying up the advances between them. The example provided is for modelling agents of Checkmate, and it is done to completion, which is a huge bonus if you’re keen for a secret agent game. With the number of advances laid out for you can also do chargen without the lifepaths, which is handy. However, the shouldn’t dub this the “quick and dirty” method – spending twenty or thirty advances across four categories, each with at least three elements is neither quick nor dirty. In fact, the method in the Highschool Yearbook is faster and simpler – and it’s a shame it isn’t included here.
Next up is something every GM is going to want: rules for adding new characters after the game has started. Also extremely handy for the toolset is the complete list of all the Distinctions in the game, including all the new ones in the Yearbook and the Watchtower Report. Much appreciated, although it would have probably been better placed in an appendix at the end – like too many things in this book, it’s not where you expect it, and too hard to find.
The next chapter is not unlike the first one with too much that is ephemeral and unnecessary. It’s called Expanding Play and the first half is a in-depth guide on how to run Features and Extras, how to frame scenes and how to drive conflicts to get the most out of your players and their Leads. Unlike the more generic villain design advice, it’s extremely useful and every Watchtower should read it and study it, possibly before each and every game. Unfortunately, it’s followed by a massive section on a less than critical subject: how to run a “parallel” episode, where the Leads are all sidelined and the show follows a completely different set of characters who have all only been in the background (as Extras or distant Features) until now. This is a classic TV trope, of course, and leads to a lot of awesome game opportunities. What’s more, the rules are clever: to ensure the characters and the episode is intimately related to your ongoing main plot, the new Leads use some of their own stats and some of the stats of the old Leads – the stat in question determined by whom their decisions will impact in the main plot. The problem is there is a huge amount of space given to this idea, including an enormously lengthy example. Unless you’re running exactly those parallel leads, they don’t need to be statted to this level of detail. And its a fairly eccentric idea anyway, which means six whole pages on it is doubly excessive. By comparison, rewriting pathways something useful to almost everyone, gets three pages.
All is forgiven when we hit the last three chapters, as we return to a more familiar style of rules crunch. In order, they cover Expanding Drives, Assets and Resources. For Drives, we have guidelines for running different sets of six values, plus some funky new ideas for having different Leads “owning” values or having a unique aspect only they embody. For Relationships we have options for relating to organisations, titles or alter egos, which are all fairly straightforward but enormously useful to have handy. Also in this section is one of my favourite ideas in the whole book: if a character dies and a new one enters the show, simply attaching the relationship of the previous character to the new one. This is a perfect way to mimic how our minds sometimes work (especially in TV drama, or watching TV drama), where we force people into old patterns because that’s what’s familiar. Of course Colonel Potter won’t match up to our feelings for Colonel Blake, but that means we get challenges and growth.
Expanding Assets is the chapter that feels like your normal sourcebook: it’s full of new toys, and boy, are they awesome. First up, there are twenty new Distinctions, including six new martial arts with their own styles, and five new Heritages. New Distinctions include awesomely useful things like Fifth Wheel, Cover Story, Criminal and Scoundrel. Distinctions also come with new mechanics – Boost, Use and Grant give temporary advantages to you or others, and Exacerbate and Shift provide more ways to mess with Stress, allowing for more subtle effects to be modelled. Abilities are equally flush with awesome: not only do we get nine new powers (including Grow/Shrink and Time Travel) we also get rules for Abilities without Limits, getting more SFX and – my favourite – using Abilities to model something which is effectively a superpower, such as being the Archbishop of Canterbury. As I have already used Mind Control to reflect high social rank in an Ancient Rome game, it was nice to know I wasn’t crazy to do so (or if I am crazy, so are the authors).
We also get new options for Gear, including Gear “suites”. This is designed to model Blue Beetle’s armour in the show but will also do nicely for say, Iron Man’s suit. Speaking of that, if you want to be say, incorporeal or a ghost (like Kitty Pride or Dead Man or Ghost Rider), there’s a new heritage for that. Want to hulk out or change form? We now have rules for that too – both flipping out with rage from your powers, and for changing form (controlled or otherwise).
The final rules chapter expands on Resources. Some of these are as expected (rewriting specialities, turning extras into features) but some are more subtle, clever or outlandish (making locations more general, sacrificing relationships when you’re finished with them). Like the earlier chapters, not every option will be useful to you, but at least one of them assuredly will be.
Which brings us back full circle to what the book actually is. Part of it is a compendium of rules options. Part of it is a list of new powers. Part of it is a monster manual. Part of it is a series guide. And part of it is GM advice. All of them are good examples of those things, some of them excellent. And some of those things go together. All of them, however, do not really make a cohesive whole. And that, ultimately, leaves the book feeling unfocussed and unfulfilling. The High School Yearbook had a narrow focus and because of that really inspired the reader to get excited and inspired about that focus. Obviously a buffet of options never has quite that luxury, but I feel there’s just too much in here regardless, and the presentation does nothing to help with the issue. It never stops feeling scattershot and disconnected, and that leaves you uninspired. In the end, it feels less like a Watchtower book and more like “everything else we wanted to get out before the licence ran out.”
The flipside of this is the book is full of stuff. Seriously full of stuff. Maybe they did just throw everything in there, but they threw EVERYTHING in there. And even if some of it you’ll never use and some of it gets too much space, tons of it will still be useful and handfuls will be just what you wanted. So while it’s not a must-have for the line, it is not a book you’ll leave on your shelf. It will be thumbed again and again for its resources, as your campaigns expand and divert and die and then restart with a new costume and lamer powers and then reboot the whole thing from scratch except now Supergirl is dead.
Style: 3 (cluttered) Substance: 4 (full to bursting)
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