Edit this Review | Unlink This Review from Liber Castellorum

Goto [ Index ]

Every superhero game needs hideouts. Every superhero game needs cool places to stay at, to go to to fight in, to see, etc. In the game In Nomine these cool places are called tethers. These are areas where the celestial realm brushes with our Corporeal realm...heck you can even get some ethereal action going as well!

This is a book of cool places within the In Nomine game. Beth McCoy, aside from her efforts at resurrecting the entire In Nomine line as its actual line editor, has done a bang up job writing and editing the contributions of a huge number of people (Mark Allen, R. Sean Borgstrom, James Cambias, Genevieve R. Cogman, Alain H. Dawson, Emily Dresner, David Edelstein, Scott Haring, Jo Hart, John Karakash, and Walter Milliken) in this book.

The tethers are organized by superior, with each one getting a listing for a major tether, an unusual tether, a generic tether, and a summary of some other tethers. There are also some interesting guidelines for creating and maintaining tethers, various campaign rules, and some nice adventure seeds.

Unlike Liber Canticorum, this book doesn't seem to be as generic and it suffers a bit for that. Because of its religious overtones In Nomine can sometimes suffer because of theological disaggreements between the authors and the reviewers. I have been upset at differences at times, yet more often I have been inspired because of the way that someone has interpreted a superior. At the same time, and perhaps more significantly Castellorum suffers because the authors cannot be more specific! In my mind Vapula's major tether should be Microsoft, but that couldn't be in the book because of libel considerations, which is unfortunate. Evidently game books aren't considered to be satire. But in the end...I wanted more tethers. This book has the tools in it for me to create more myself, but I wanted more sparks to my (sometimes) lazy imagination.

This is another essential book in the Liber series, and I highly recommend it. The lists of tethers might not inspire you as greatly as the lists of relics and songs did in other products, but there are enough guidelines here that if you use your imagination you'll be running wild with these ideas in no time.

Generally I hate buying books that are mere expansions of material in the original rulebooks. This, and the other Liber books, is more than worth having. You don't need them because the rules are broken in the original (White Wolf seems to make a habit of this)...you want them because they are filled with cool ideas and things you've never considered before. You need this book because it contains a multitude of sparks for the imagination and campaign. I give it a solid "B."

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)