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An incredible book for all Mage storytellers! The chapters about the Orders past, about the "awakened nations" (and their Mysteries to solve!) around the world are awesome and very, very useful for any storyteller. It's full of plot hooks.
In fact, I can imagine an entire chronicle around the world, where PCs are the Order ambassadors and try to find allies against the Seers, learn of the complex history of the Orders, or discover the many magical weird things found in this book.
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The content of the book is great and the PDF is well scanned. HOWEVER, the print-on-demand physical book is atrocious for the price. Here are the reasons:
- The paper is low quality, about a step or 2 above "Bible quality"
- It's gluebound which is ridiculous both for the price and the size of the book (600+ pages). This will fall apart very fast when in actual use
- The print quality is awful, the text (and especially pictures) are ACTUALLY BLURRY.
Note that this is not necessarily a dig at DRPG as I've ordered good quality print-on-demand books from here before. But I am still saddened by DRPG collaborating with such a low-quality printing company.
Wish I had believed the other 1-star review on here.
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A wonderful recourse for Scions, both Divine and Draconic! In particular I loved the unique takes on the dragons themselves, the storybits hidden within, and the clear love that went into its creation! It is well worth any Scion players time!
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Fantastic bookAnd it has a much wider set of supported game styles than you might think.While the book has been built with pulp adventures from the the 40 through 60 in mind. But other kinds of story can be told, like a more political tale or a purely investigative story.
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Fun reading a story about someone erupting with superpowers and how they deal with that.
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This book seems to have been writent with a "less is more" approach, as in less information is more inspiration. The problem is the "less" part. Page count ? Lack of inspiration ? Weak direction ? The fact is that this book never give details on any of the many subjects. Asking for Storyteller to fill in the holes by not giving information is a bad way to encourage inspiration, especialy when compared to other WoD sourcebooks, old and new.
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Dense with ideas, story hooks, fun monsters and enough room, to make this story your own!
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I've been a fan of White Wolf games (and then Onyx Path) since almost the beginning and I have an extensive library of WW/OP products from several lines. One thing that I have always appreciated about Vampire/Werewolf/Mage/Wraith/etc. is how well-researched and informative their books are so that if you want to run a story or campaign in a time or setting that you are not intimately familiar with, you can do a decent job immersing your players in the setting in a believable way. I'm currently preparing to run a Technocracy campaign for my group and when I discovered that a new book had just been released, I was excited and bought it as soon as I could.
While I was looking forward to learning more about the Victorian Age with a World of Darkness spin to it, what I was continually frustrated with was that this book cannot help but interject "modern sensibilities" into nearly every page. Yes, there were many atrocities committed during Imperialism. Yes, humanity has a bad track record of how it treats humanity. That being said, it is now history, and I didn't particularly enjoy paying $55 for a hard-bound 260+ page essay about how awful and evil Imperialism was and that we should continue to somehow be ashamed of events that occurred over a hundred years ago. Historical context is what I paid for. Op-ed lectures get extremely tiresome and are not helpful.
I would love to keep buying new products from Mage 20th Anniversary edition, but I don't want to keep supporting treatises about current socio-political opinions when I'm trying to run what amounts to a modern fantasy game. If you are one of the authors, PLEASE stick to the fantasy setting and stop drowning readers in your biases.
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The book contains chronicles about Vampire the Masquerade in the V3/V20 era. The content is useful for players and STs alike who are searching for inspirations for plots, character and scenario building, especially if you want to play a setting in San Francisco, CA. If you just want a casual read in the World of Darkness setting, while you commute or sit by your bed or couch during a lazy sunday, that is also a good choice, and how I enjoyed it.
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An excellent storybook on immortal souls, memory, and eternal middle management. The different tiers of the cults allow for games at various power levels. Every paragraph was bursting with story hooks. A superb read, and improvement upon 1e. Highly recommend, with gorgeous grayscale art.
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A small book that really punches above its weight. Covering Freeholds, Entitlements, Tokens, and Mantles, it really expands on the core book and fluffs hope Changeling society and magic in many ways. Strongly recommended if you enjoy Changeling in any forms.
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There aren't enough pre-written adventures (I don't why only D&D and Cthulhu have a lot of adventures!!) for this kind of sophisticated roleplaying games. Novas Worldwide is a great adventure anthology, lots of good ideas, interesting themes, NPCs, even a map (!).
If you want to start an Aberrant campaign (or even for another superheroes RPG), read and GM this anthology!
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the actual text of this book is good. the rules are good. Some changes from the Revised Edition were made that I'm not a fan of.
BUYER BEWARE THE PRINT ON DEMAND VERSION OF THIS BOOK IS FLIMSY AND LOW QUALITY
I sincerely hope that I was sent the standard hardcover on accident. the glue binding feels as if it threatens to break having the book open. and the book is so thick that i fear opening it fully as not to bend the subpar binding glue. Setlle for the PDF, or shop somewhere else for the physical copy.
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Really excellent book. Compelling and useful mix of NPCs, and the full release has added a bunch more than just a compilation of the original bite-sized releases. As a setting nerd, I really love how the writers have used these character write-ups as opportunities to expand the setting and introduce us to brand-new cultures and locations that seem really vibrant and compelling, rather than just writing up characters who live in the places we already know about. Almost every entry is a plot hook, a usable story-in-motion, and a window to a new part of Creation that makes it feel much more lived in. I particularly love the Quaghead tribes, the Boneyard Kettle, and the Devilfish Schools! (hoping for more Undersea content down the line!) Echoing hopes that Onyx Path might carry on with this model (as well as with other focuses like location writeups for whatever gets missed in At8D, or artifacts/martial arts etc.)
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Overall, is a good rethinking of the first game, but there are some things that make me stuck to a setting more akin to the first edition than this. I mean, almost every Pantheon fights a significant Titan and have epic adversaries, but the Orisha and Loa fight against racism and some evil sorcerers? That sounds condescending, and a deterrent to play as one of their Scions; in the first edition, they fought a water Titan that had strong ties to slavery and racism, and the mix between mythical threat and cultural conflict was quite cool; why eschew that?. And in a world in which ancient gods are real and active and everyone knows about it, humanity had to endure the same hardships and mistakes? That doesn´t make sense to me. Also, the differences between God, Titan and Primordial sometimes are really confusing; one time they say that Primordials are entire worlds similar to the Greater Titans of the first edition, next time they present you a creator God with his role and avatar as a Primordial (like Izanami and Izanagi). Or they say "the difference between Gods and Titans is Titans don´t care about humanity", and then they describe a guy who doesn´t care about humanity and call him God. So I take the rules, cultural information and some other improvements, and adapt them to the setting of the first edition, thanks. I know that one of the good things of roleplaying games is that you don´t have to follow the book to the last letter and you can adapt it to a setting and rules more fitting to your and your players' tastes, but this edition seems to force you to do that, due to the confusing and contradictory information.
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