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I picked up two Greg Stolze products the other day. I bought Seeds of the New Flesh for Feng Shui to actually use and Lawyers, Guns, and Money just for the fun of the read. The good news is that one of them really captured the feel of the game and made me want to drop everything and run an adventure set there. The bad news is that it was not Seeds of the New Flesh.

To be fair, I suspect that I am not the target audience Greg was writing for. I was playing D&D in '78 and graduated to Villains & Vigilantes as soon as I saw it. I played Champions most of my gaming time after that and played Shadowrun (and hailed the changes in SR2) and Earthdawn. I bought FS when it came out and have stayed (quietly) active on the list and supported the game even Daedalus went belly-up.

Notice anything about my game choices? I have had all the games I played accused of being "minimaxer" games, because the relatively open framework choices are pretty easy to abuse. I personally like the games because they each gave me freedom to design what I wanted, but I have met cruddy power gamers and am aware of the stereotype. "Feng Shui players are powergamers into playing wild action and violence." Well, our most fun set pieces have been the donut shop bits, but maybe we're the weirdos.

So why am I wasting your time telling you this? Well, because the stuff I saw in Seeds of the New Flesh made me think more of the stereotype than of my own group. There was very little for me to use. Let me share with you the parts that were really good.

THE NEAT STUFF Stolze is at his best when putting nice little digs at pop culture into his work, acting sort of like a Ben Elton or Dennis Miller of Gaming. The Buro's primer for agents returning to the 1996 juncture is hilarious and darkly true at the same time. The occasional over-the-top funny breaks the mood a little. (I personally found the non-sexist alternative to Mr. Mrs. Ms., Mc, hilarious, but doubt my group would treat 2056 as anything but cartoony after using that phrase.)

Among the unneeded new templates were a couple of really good ones. The "criminal mastermind" template was masterful. Will someone ELSE run this game so I can do the criminal mastermind? Please, please, please! It was funny, but had just enough hook that you could tone it down to make it into an actual character to act rather than a frothing scenery-chewing stereotype.

The concept of altering hopping vampires into antipersonnel creatures called Bouncing Benjis was just evil, funny, and creepy all around. The way arcanowave devices WANT to do harm all the time that they're on or OFF duty made me think of evil ideas for a GMC cyborg the players trust. Finally, the idea of someone "unraveling" from arcanowave abuse was really neat until I realized that the actual scene of unraveling is never used, just the game mechanics.

THE NOT-SO-NEAT STUFF I'm not sure what was going on with the writing process. I do note that the stuff section (hi-tech future gizmos) is larger than any other section. I found the scenery gizmos useful – null-grav cranes and elevators have some great stunt potential for a fight. The rest was tolerable or annoying, depending on how much you like big guns and player-hosing technology. Personally, I preferred the scary neighborhood watch grannies (who have disappeared) to the ubiquitous retinal cameras that can track you down within seconds.

The new archetypes may have been stuck in because a new book demands new archetypes, I suppose. The resistance fighter would have been more interesting had any of the resistance groups rated more than a sentence of explanation in the entire book. The rest are 2056 retreads of existing archetypes. The Supersoldier is just an Ex-SPF on Arcanowaves. I think the Drifter and the Consumer on the Brink are really Everyday Heroes with a different melodramatic hook and replacement schticks. They didn't need their own archetypes. I shudder at the idea of a player who WANTS to play the Uberkid. Our Scrappy Kid ran a rather fine line trying to run amusing without being annoying. I have trouble seeing a rational group adopting the Uberkid. Why let someone that dangerous tag along AND LEARN FROM YOU? Kill it now, before it matures.

The writeups of Boatman and Bonengel left me bored. Granted, there was a neat bit of hand waving trying to make it look as if Boatman was a chi focus because he was destined to be chi focus, but it didn't quite pan out. (Clyde Throckmorton was much more interesting, and didn't contradict any "rules of physics" for his game setting.) How the heck did a "selfish, womanizing prick" and a messiah wannabe become the vested heirs of the chi of the world? Well, I don't know. You see, the history section of Feng Shui has much more information in 2 pages than we were given in this whole book. If you were to go by this book, it just sorta happened.

THE MISSING STUFF The history and society of 2056 are not here at all. If you want to know how the Bobos came to power, what led to the pacification of Texas, why Flying Fortresses nailed the Riviera, well, you're reading the wrong book. This book is notably lacking any sense of history, any real organizations, or even campaign hooks for innerwalking characters to visit and hang out in 2056. Black Market? Well, it's there to buy real food, but only for a sentence or so and then again in how to get rich. Resistance organizations? The Luddites, Blackwater Fury, Fists of Freedom, and Grumps are given a sentence each. The Jammers are mentioned offhandedly in the Buro propoganda only. The Purists are not even mentioned. Typical neighborhood? Sorry.

The characters get shorted, too. In Back for Seconds, the Buro characters got more explanation and motivation than in this entire book. The sneaky out-of-control abomos seem to have been revised out of existence. There's no sign of Omega, Vivisectors, or any of the other plotters. (Desdemona does appear, but she's straightforward in her wants.) We get one supersoldier, one virtuous Abomo, and a slew of undescribed unnamed characters. Unnamed characters get stat lists. Does anyone NOT have unnamed Buro guys already made up?

Even the prechapter fiction for the book is a retread of the Jason X stuff from Back for Seconds, only BfS did it faster and cleaner. There is more creepiness in the Tac Ops section of BfS than in the predictable melodrama of the entire Jef Moore saga.

TO SUM UP Gosh, I wanted to like this book. But high expectations mean that I'm very disappointed. The cool ideas (the Arcanoware wants to hurt people, the Criminal Mastermind template, the gear, and the cool pop culture commentary) did not make up for the lack of material that I wanted. It's possible that we'll get a Resistance 2056 book later that has the organizations, the Jammers, etc. I'll buy that one. This one I'll keep in the interests of keeping the FS line alive. (If I don't sell it used, that's one more new for someone to buy)

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)