Review of The Way of War

You would have to be playing the Way of War.

The Way of War is a generic miniatures system, which allows you to fight some truly weird combinations of stuff. Take the aforementioned Clowns, for instance. (I SHOULD call them by their proper name of the Circus of Terror, but a clown is a clown is a clown. Even when they are armed with acidic Seltzer bottles or exploding pies or throwing knives)

Picking up the book, you will instantly notice a few things about about it. One, it's pretty solid - there is a lot of stuff packed into these pages. The art is not overpowering, although you do get illustrations for each of the 20 provided army lists. There are no pictures of miniatures for the game - a slight ding in my book for a miniatures game, but I suppose keeping in the "generic" category it makes it hard to feature miniatures of any one sort or another.

The rules seem to cover the wide range of things that can occur in a miniatures game - and even a few that probably won't. (Swimming? In a wargame??) Sometimes, the rules get a little difficult to understand - "Once all 1/2 of the units of the army that won Initiative have resolved Range Combat, the next highest army Initiative may have half of the units they are intending to use in Range Combat do so". Okay, the concept is pretty simple - the loser of initiative fires with half of their models now - but the language gets bogged down. I suppose this is prevent any ambiguity, but it takes a couple of reads and a playtest or two before these things make sense.

The meat of the book, however, isn't really in the rules. The meat is in the creation rules, the background and the armies. Because here is where all of the fun is.

The Creation rules allow you to make Way of War stats for any miniature you own. Really. Take, for instance, that old Ogre (the humanoid, not the cybertank) that you have had for years. Using the Creation rules, you can give him stats, special abilities, and so forth. Next, give him a weapon - you can create anything from a powerful sword to a megacannon. Then, you could make an artillery piece for him to man. You really do have a wide range of options available to you in the Creation rules.

As a side note, there is a warning about using the Creation rules for games. It states that, like any such system, there are always places for min/max people to create loopholes and bend the system for their gain. The point of the Creation rules is to make the Way of War as flexible as possible - not for powergamer Joe to beat his friends because he knows how to shave points. A good note.

Next, the history. The Way of War, you see, is a long road in some extra-dimensional place. For some reason, the Way tends to draw people in- people, towns, armies, etc. All along the Way exist people and places from a million different times, places, races, and so forth. It is a very nice backstory to let you create believable scenarios when you have the Circus of Terror fighting your Azteks.

Which brings us to the army lists. There are twenty provided in the book, ranging from the clowns (sorry, I just can't get over a wargame with clowns) to an army of...turtles?! And cybernetic Knights. And a lost World War One Regiment. And more.

The layout of the book is good, with good section headings, and each page having a footer to denote its contents. The book also has both a table of contents AND an index - obviously, they have read a few RPGNet reviews. The art is....well, it isn't terrible, but most of the pieces don't scream off the page to catch your eye. The cover art is not what I would have picked, either.

Still, if you want to see what your fantasy armies can do against armies from the far future, or you just want the opportunity to hurl explosive pies in a wargame, take a look at the Way of War. The goods outweigh the ills by a good margin. Besides, if you don't, the clowns are going to eat my brain.

-Robert E. Allen III

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)