Review of Big Bang: The Mostly Illustrated RPG Guide to Firearms Volume 1
I'm a gamer who years ago switched my interests to the great desert of roleplaying games, modern and near-future genre games. They all dried up back in the mid or late 1990's, leaving a lot of gamers to rely on out-of-print game systems that were hard to track down. Thankfully, we've got D20 Modern to change all that at long last. As a modern gamer, I have a big interest in guns. Lots of guns, big, small, and anything in between. And like the rest of you, I've been forced to rely on a wide variety of gun resources that didn't necessarily fit into the game system we were playing with, either, in particular Gung,Gung,Guns, Palladium's Compendium of Modern Weapons, and Chameleon Eclectic's Ultramodern Firearms.
When Ultramodern Firearms, generally considered the best gun resource going for RPGs, was updated to D20 modern, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I bet a lot of you thought so too. Guess what! We were all wrong! There is a new gun guide in town and it puts Ultramodern Firearms to absolute shame. The book is part of a series called Big Bang. Surprisingly, the book is from a game company I like, but I had thought they had dried up and blown away in the wind.
Big Bang takes a completely different tact on presenting gun information for the gamer by going digital with the exclusive intent to discard the worries about conserving page count to reduce overhead production costs. By doing so, the presentation of weapons is much improved over its competing predecessors. Big Bang starts out by first providing you at least a full page non-game info on the gun. This includes photographs or illustrations of the weapon, a standardized block of real world data (including stuff like length, loaded and empty weight, ranges, accuracy measurements and rate of fire), and text covering some background, technical, and/or historical information on the weapon or family of closely related weapons. Most guns have just one page of this stuff, but some, like the OICW rifle the US Army is investing in, can have as much as 5 or 6 pages devoted like this. It then finishes off with a final page which provides stats for D20 Modern and another game system called CyberThriller. A separate booklet of conversion rules is available, adding a number of additional systems that you can quite easily convert the real world data to game stats.
In addition to the extensive listings for weapons, it also provides some very well thought out rules governing all sorts of bullets, gun calibers, the defensibility of materials used for cover, weapon misfires, and more. And it goes far more in-depth than other similar products, while always maintaining a focus on accurately converting the real world to the game world.
This first volume presents stats for close to 120 different weapons for D20 Modern. While that may not seem much, it is a great value, providing over 1/3 of the number of guns presented in Ultramodern, an at $5.00, which is less than 1/5 the price. On top of that, an effort was made to prevent a lot of duplication of effort. Most of the guns here aren't presented in other gun books. Additionally, it is a multi-volume set, so I'm hoping the promise of having thousands of guns detailed eventually proves true. And for my final note, being a digital product, it was also designed to take advantage of the fact that it will likely be printed on a home computer printer. Remember the pre-release promises of TSR's Monstrous Compendium about the ability to alphabetize every monster? They make the same sort of promise, but actually keep it this time around. Every sheet of paper you print is devoted to a single gun or family of guns. I LOVE IT!
When Ultramodern Firearms, generally considered the best gun resource going for RPGs, was updated to D20 modern, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I bet a lot of you thought so too. Guess what! We were all wrong! There is a new gun guide in town and it puts Ultramodern Firearms to absolute shame. The book is part of a series called Big Bang. Surprisingly, the book is from a game company I like, but I had thought they had dried up and blown away in the wind.
Big Bang takes a completely different tact on presenting gun information for the gamer by going digital with the exclusive intent to discard the worries about conserving page count to reduce overhead production costs. By doing so, the presentation of weapons is much improved over its competing predecessors. Big Bang starts out by first providing you at least a full page non-game info on the gun. This includes photographs or illustrations of the weapon, a standardized block of real world data (including stuff like length, loaded and empty weight, ranges, accuracy measurements and rate of fire), and text covering some background, technical, and/or historical information on the weapon or family of closely related weapons. Most guns have just one page of this stuff, but some, like the OICW rifle the US Army is investing in, can have as much as 5 or 6 pages devoted like this. It then finishes off with a final page which provides stats for D20 Modern and another game system called CyberThriller. A separate booklet of conversion rules is available, adding a number of additional systems that you can quite easily convert the real world data to game stats.
In addition to the extensive listings for weapons, it also provides some very well thought out rules governing all sorts of bullets, gun calibers, the defensibility of materials used for cover, weapon misfires, and more. And it goes far more in-depth than other similar products, while always maintaining a focus on accurately converting the real world to the game world.
This first volume presents stats for close to 120 different weapons for D20 Modern. While that may not seem much, it is a great value, providing over 1/3 of the number of guns presented in Ultramodern, an at $5.00, which is less than 1/5 the price. On top of that, an effort was made to prevent a lot of duplication of effort. Most of the guns here aren't presented in other gun books. Additionally, it is a multi-volume set, so I'm hoping the promise of having thousands of guns detailed eventually proves true. And for my final note, being a digital product, it was also designed to take advantage of the fact that it will likely be printed on a home computer printer. Remember the pre-release promises of TSR's Monstrous Compendium about the ability to alphabetize every monster? They make the same sort of promise, but actually keep it this time around. Every sheet of paper you print is devoted to a single gun or family of guns. I LOVE IT!
