Druken PREview Feng Shui 2nd Edition.

[Schleiermacher]

While this is overall a funny and informative review, the Bullet Time thing is clearly a deliberate joke/genre flavor tip and harping on it makes you look stupid.

[Josh_Kablack]

If you're right, I am totally willing to fall on my face over that. Heck, with the amount of booze I consume writing this, I'm probably falling on my face anyways.

Personally, I suspect it was a dodge-boosting schtick like the 1e versions of Crane Stance, Fox's Retreat or Willow Step in early playtest until Robin noticed how the rules actually worked and wrote a flippant note to himself and his playtesters to not take it, which then proceeded not to get corrected by all the people mentioned in my sig. And given the overall editing quality of the rest of the manuscript, incompetence looks like at least as safe a bet as humor.

[Shady314]

I'm always very impressed by these drunken p/reviews. When I get drunk I mostly alternate between muttering bullshit (the actual word), yelling bullshit and laughing for no particular reason.

[Josh_Kablack]

Confession time: not all of the recent entries have been written with me appropriately sloshed. But I'm a pair of Summer Shandies in and killing the white wine left in my fridge currently, so time to put on the Ok Go Umbrella Dance Album and try to get through the rest of the guns rules.

After the schticks, the guns rules have been cleaned up with nothing that's not an improvement since the playtest, so I won't have new complaints, I'mma just gonna harp on stuff I harped on previously that didn't get improved.



The options for what to do when your gun is empty are now clearly spelled out with clear shot costs for reload, switch weapons, drop and draw a new weapon and just drop your weapon. My only gripe is that "pistol whip a mofo with the empty glock" isn't explicitly covered and therefore might cost one more shot than it probably should. Rearming is cleaned up. When disarmed you now have the options of:
1> make a Rearm Check using your Defense against a difficulty of the Attack of the foe who Disarmed you. On a success recover your weapon at no shot cost, on a failure, spend three shots rearming.
xor
2> make a Stunt attack which lets you pick up a dropped weapon from the battlefield (see I fucking told you Battle Scavenge was something characters just did without a schtick) as part of an attack. This takes as long as your stunt attacks otherwise would (usually three shots) and if it fails, you can later try more, but once you've tried a stunt attack, you cannot go back and later make a Rearm check.

These probably aren't ideal, but I can understand how they work and guess when my character would want to use them, which were two properties the playtest versions of Rearm Checks did not have. So let's call in Charlie Sheen to celebrate.

Speaking of Charlie Sheen, my drink is empty, so I'm off to mix the closest approximation of Tiger Blood my liquor cabinet can accomplish. Since the internet does not agree on even the basics of what such a shot should contains, I cannot possibly do it wrong.
....
....
....
Ok back with a concoction of vokda, seltzer, limes and maraschino cherries for blood-coloring.

The Malfunction rules are still as "you better carry multiple guns" as they used to be, and I still have mixed feelings about that. And those feelings are mixed in the bad way, not the way my drink is. Autofire rules are still "have +2 damage, make more rolls to see if you need to reload". Concealment is still as it was, with no differentiation possible for you're sneaking guns in past Goldfinger vs sneaking them past Oddjob. Bazookas, RPGs and other military grade weaponry still inexplicably have different damage values based on the current wound point total of the foes you are shooting them at.

And that brings me to the guns statlines.

The section for Past weapons still makes me sad, not only should there be more options, and not only should some of them be actually niche-viable for action movie characters who want to specialize in them, but the crossbow flavor text calls it several centuries obsolete in 1850, when Wikipedia disagrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow#M ... litary_use

The rest of the chapter has a bunch of flavor text that is only slightly less obviously 90s holdovers than it was for my prior rant. The single Target Pistol got updated to have a reload value of 6 (possibly due to my email pointing out that all other single shot weapons only rate a 6, and reload rolls are strictly greater than), but still has flavor text explaining the 7 value since it reloads in slow motion.

The rifles section has added a Winchester Model 70 since the playtest version, so there is at least one standard bolt-action hunting rifle to use for non-military types, but the stats given are for a .458 Magnum round instead of the more common, especially in movies 30 ought six. The lack of any standard hunter's .22 rifle is in the section is a regrettable oversight.

And that finishes the chapter, the album and my surprisingly tasty Vodka cocktail all at the same time.

[Josh_Kablack]

Chapter 6: Fu Schticks

Best Hits: The biggest improvement over 1e is clearly streamlining the paths so players no longer need flowcharts to understand prerequisites.
Worst Flops: Handling of the customization sidebar; lack of destructive rules-lawyer playtesting for many schticks.

So I'm working my way through a case of Pious Monk Dunkel for this chapter. While Monk beer is apropos to the Fu chapter, this brew is rather more Benedictine than Shaolin. It's still really tasty, and I can recommend it, even if it has no (flying windmill) kick.

This section opens with a half-page full color illo of the sample martial artist about to hadoken a bunch of big and scary killer-robot mooks. It's a nice pic, but there isn't a hadoken schtick in here and the sample martial artist's anti-mook schticks all involve nunchaku with her barehanded strikes are specced against named opponents. That sort of "nice at first glance, but not fully considered" is an apt summary of this entire section.

Shortly after the basics we get an "Other Schools, Other Bruises" sidebar which specifies that players who have played before and who are playing Old Masters or Martial Artists are free to swap out their Fu paths for different ones, provided they get MC approval. This sidebar includes a warning that "Your character won't be as roadtested as the mainline archetype, and may require adjustment on the fly to make it as fun to play as the core versions". On the surface that doesn't look bad, but I'm really wondering why it's in this section instead of mentioned on the sheets for the Martial Artist and Old Master. And then I'm wondering why only those two archetypes are mentioned and why Bandits, Ex-Special Forces, Exorcist Monks, Ninjas, Redeemed Pirates, Scrappy Kids, Sifus, and Sword Masters aren't called out as being allowed to swap their schticks with MC approval. And on top of that, I'm wondering why the Fu schtick section has such a sidebar but the Guns Schtick section doesn't -- I guess that means that Guns characters really cannot customize and my hyper-literalism about having printed schticks nobody can ever take is correct. Looking ahead, Sorcery gets a similar customization sidebar, but Driving, Creature Powers, Tranimal, Mutant and Scroungetech do not, so between the organizational choices and a lack of attention to detail it really looks like the probably intended customization goes against the rules as actually written for anything that's not an Old Master, Martial Artist nor Sorcerer.

As I have stated before that's bad. But this sort of arrangement is even worse than I first realized, as it makes expansion material very likely unworkable. For 1e, Atlas/Daedelus could just put out Generic Splatbook with new archetypes and new Guns / Fu / Sorcery / Critter / Arcanowave schticks in that book. And in that model, corebook archetypes could pick up relevant Schticks from the splatbook via either chargen selections or with advancement. Any new splatbook archetypes could gain corebook schticks the same way. Under this 2e setup, each archetype not only has their default schticks lock in, but also has a preselected list of schticks and fu paths that they can pick up for their advancement listed in the Awesomeing Up section for the archetype. What this means is that by a literalist reading of the rules corebook characters are not able to gain splatbook schticks, and splatbook archetypes are not able to gain schticks from future splatbooks. Effectively, any new schtick released needs to have a backwards-looking list of archetypes whose advancement options it erratas to include itself. That's horrible and expansion material would work much simpler and with smaller margin for editorial screwups if advancement was by category of schtick instead of by exhaustive list of individual schticks.

But hey, at least this chapter got the internal arrangement right, in that we get the rules (thin though they may be) before the schticks instead of getting bonuses to things that hadn't yet been explained like in the prior chapter work.

After that we get into the Fu paths. I'm still not thrilled about having Fu Schticks broken into paths at all, but I still can't deny that the streamlinging from 1e where paths are usually no more than 7 schticks and usually in something close to a straight line is a improvement over 1e stuff like the old Path of the Storm Turtle.

As to the actual paths, most of my ranting from the playtest still holds.

Stave off Monkey had the shot cost raised to 5, which it is marginally better, but still crazytown. It has no chi cost and as an interrupt it negates any attack after that attack would otherwise have been successful, so a PCs with this can just sacrifice actions to be nigh-immune to damage. Upping the shot cost to 5, means that doing so against the standard 3-shot attack is only an outright win in the action economy when numbers are even and enemies are less than 60% to hit you. Comparing the defense of thew Sifu who starts with this against the sample numbers given for enemies, that 19 of the 22 featured foes listed have attacks where they will on average hit the Sifu less than 60% of the time ( Edit: And the Exorcist Monk who actually starts with this has a defense that is one point higher than the Sifu, meaning that two of those 60+% drop to 57%). I could get into what fights vs mooks or vs bosses do to the math here, but the bottom line is that this is too good without unless a cost beyond actions to use. Letting chip damage through would be fine, making it cost chi points to use would be fine, limiting it once-per sequence would be fine, as printed it's nuts. If you're willing to go one more scthick up this path, you get Thwart the Dragon, which is a 2-shot interrupt that allows you to negate all wound points an ally takes from an attack, but at least that has a Chi cost after the first time you use it this fight.

Path of the Death Punch still tops out at the Dim Mak, which has two prerequisites and after the 2nd sequence lets you make a martial arts attack against a Featured Foe (not a boss) with if it hits ignores toughness sets their current wound points to 34. It costs 3 Chi to use, but if it misses, you get a 2 chi refund. The thing is, that 3 chi is like one-third of your total of what is nominally a per-session resource, so you better hope your sessions don't include multiple fights or battles where the PCs are outnumbered by featured foes.. The other thing is that at 34 wound points, that foe can still act. Compare to Path of the Sword's Lethal Strike, which only has one prerequisite, and after the 2nd sequence lets you down a featured foe as a one-shot, no chi action, at the cost of getting yourself a Mark of Death. And while Marks of Death are horrible risks if you play the game straight, the reality is that you are unlikely to be using either without cheese-combos, and since any healing removes all marks of death, the Swordmaster combo is easier to setup, since it just requires any PC with any healing, while Dim Mak requires you to set up a Fortune Recharge Engine.

Path of the Drunken Master: This is unchanged since the playtest version, all my prior complaints hold. It results in rules-lawyering about not needing to use bonus schticks, it has a toughness boost that breaks the RNG, and even when used as intended, it's a bunch of low-probability flails wasting table time as players forget to stack bonuses. The only change is that alteration elsewhere has given Drunken Fist a new abusive combo, remember that in about 500 words.

Path of Fire: This is still boring and not evocative of the source material. Which is really a Shame

Path of the Fox: This got cleaned up a bit since playtest. It's actually about where paths should be now in that it has useful stuff and diverse stuff and combo potential and the schticks are comprehensible (unless I go full rules-lawyer on edge cases). Throwing an opponent N meters is still kinda silly in an anti-map system, but whaddeva.

Path of the Healer: Minor cleanup happened here, there's no longer wording that implies overhealing can happen. The Schtick that reverses Point Blockage is actually useless, not merely the extremely rare use that I called useless in my post about the playtest Fu schticks. Due to enemy assymetry, foes no longer use schticks which cost Chi/Fortune/Genome, etc, ( because that is an extra variable bogging down the MC, and an skews expenditures in favor of enemies who are only in one fight vs PCs who will be in multiple fights for session ) and well, Point Blockage costs Chi to activate and there is no alternate version later on in the "foe schticks" chapter, so your Sifu will in fact never use this and you should use the space on your character sheet for an appropriate sticker like instead.

Path of the Montage's Flesh Wound in unchanged. I know I'm being kinda hyper-literalist, but the game needs a Toughness floor and/or this needs some additional use cost for to actually work as intended, instead of being a schtick where you argue rules as written in place of taking damage.

Path of The Ninja: gathering the Darkness did get wording cleaned up. Now instead of rolling Notice for each and every mook when you use this, it instead provides a defense bonus against foes who have yet to hit you this fight.

Path of the Nunchaku / Path of the Sword: Mechanically I can't hate on these, but conceptually I really dislike having multiple schticks tied to specific weapons. Fortunately this game doesn't have a D&D (any edition) item system, so we're not into "doom glaive" territory, but it still doesn't sit well. At least Path of the Sword does it right and has only one schtick that actually specifies a bonus with your sword, so you totally can play Yasuri Shichika or Grave Stormborne or another swordsmaster who refuses to draw his blade. With the nunchuks all the bonuses only apply to nunchuk attacks, so you lose the use of up to 5 schticks when disarmed.

Path of the Outlaw has now been alphabetized correctly, which makes it slightly less obvious that it, Hundred Names and Montage really only cover a single path's worth of conceptual space. None of my earlier questions about Turn the Tables are answered.

Path of the Weapon Master: Mesmerizing Dart got reworded so that it doesn't actually require a dart or shuriken attack. You spend 1 chi and 1 shot, and for Keyframe duration, any opponent you attack loses 1 shot, regardless of whether your attack hits or misses. If there was a schtick on another path that let you attack at a shot cost of 1, you could use the target multiple opponents rules to stunlock an arbitrarily large number of opponents without even needing to roll for it. Oh wait, that's about 550 words, the 2nd tier of Drunken Master lets you trade accuracy for lower shot cost attacks.

kung-fu faceplam seems mandatory here

Moving on, HOLY SHIT FLYING WINDMILL KICK GOT PATCHED!!!!!! How the fuck did that happen? and can we please put that playtester in charge of the next edition? It's now a 4-shot zero-chi kick attack (so no added weapon damage) that maxes out as a three hit combo, you know the way Street Fighter has been doing it since 1987. So it's roughly balanced against other schticks, still feels unique and emulates the primary source material. This seems appropriate

Path of the Willow is unchanged, and would still likely be weaksauce even if Stave off Monkey and Flesh Wound had been adequately patched.

Path of Wing Chun, Path of Wushu: My prior complaints hold for these.

and that's the chapter, up next I get to see just how few of the chase rules got fixed

[Josh_Kablack]

Chapter 7: What, me playtest?

Best Hits: Having Chase Rules and related shcticks in the core book instead of trying to shoehorn them into a supplement later,
Worst Flops: Literally everything else. These rules were not read, let alone playtested before publication.

None of the text in the driving rules section has been changed since my prior post on the section*
*caveat: I am seriously buzzed as I write this.

So just go back and read my post about the "playtest" version of the chase rules to see how nutzoid that is.

The Schtick Section has Counterslam II and III give different bonus values now.

The vehicle stats have layout, and the summary table was moved forward. Now only 6 vehicles are given full statblocks before the chart appear, instead of all of them. It's still odd that the chart isn't first, but that is an improvement I can point too.

And to be truly thorough, three additional pieces of art appear in the chapter. That makes an exhaustive list of changes since the I ranted about the "playtest" version of these rules. The good news is that means this chapter's rant is already done and next time it's finally on to Sorcery.

[Josh_Kablack]

revisiting Chapter 2: Something really important I missed

I just realized that since the playtest, there is no longer a Chapter 12: Advancement, and instead those rules no appear in Chapter 2 before the Archetype listing. So I probably should have already covered them.

Best Hits Advancement is no longer the crazy triangular advancement of 1e, stat and AV increases are regulated
Worst Flops The rigid list of allowable advancements for each archetype prohibits some schticks from ever being taken by any archetypes and has huge problems in how it interacts with any potential future supplements.

Basically everyone gets an advancement when they get an advancement. In the default game, the first one is when you capture a Feng Shui site, and from there on in you make die rolls based on the number of sites you control with bonuses if it's been too long since the last successful roll. There's a big sidebar that give an alternate but roughly equivalent system for games that ditched the whole chi-war backstory and aren't using Feng Shui sites.

All PCs always have the same number of advancements. The group gets them together and even if you missed one or more session(s) that granted advancements, you get to add those the next time you show up. Most archetypes have listed advancements that include a bunch of schticks, gaining a new skill, increasing a prior skill, or raising your backup attack to one less than your primary attack. Every five advancements, you get the option to increase one of your stats (Primary Attack, Defense, Toughness, Fortune, Speed), and if you chose to forgo such a stat advancement in favor of finishing out a schtick combo, you explicitly are allowed to go back and advance a stat later. However, you cannot raise a stat if it is already a higher value than any other player character has in that stat.

Seeing as the advancement rules were the most widely recognized failure point of the prior edition, this is all a massive improvement that deserves praise.

Triangular advancement is gone, characters do not fall horribly behind for buying schticks in place of saving for AV increases, primary attack and defense values increase at about the same rate for all PCs, so the RNG degrades less over time.

However, there are still issues. The biggest ones I have already alluded to: Some schticks are flat-out unattainable by the rules as written, and any additional splatbooks need to have schticks that list which archetypes can advance into them ( and at 36 archetypes before any splatbook, that a lot of added wordcount for each new schtick ).

On top of that, the concept of an advancement roll is at best unnecessary and at worst demoralizing, I don't think it adds anything over having advancement on a set schedule (every Nth session) or using pure MC fiat instead of MC fiat (number of sites) plus a die roll.

Then there is the issue that using Stat advancements for Toughness or Fortune is inferior to buying up your Primary Attack, Defense or Speed - but the slow pace of stat advancements and the use of other PC values as caps should prevent that from being a balance problem in any game you will ever actually see.

And as a final quibble, it is possible (although probably non optimal) to use regular, non-stat advancements to break to RNG on non-attack skills. For example, an Archer can spend one advancement to gain Driving* (or any other skill), and then four more Advancements to raise it to Driving: 15, matching the Driver archetype and marginally outperforming the Maverick Cop and Highway Ronin. And there's no cap, so if the game goes long enough, the Archer can spend another 4 advancements to get to Driving 19, and laugh through chase scenes that involved characters who haven't spent any advancement on Driving. This is going to be pretty rare, but it seems like it would have been easy enough to adapt the "can't raise it if you are already higher than any other PC" to prevent this sort of situation.

[Username17]

It really sounds like Feng Shui 2 is at its best when it simplifies and at its worst when it bloats. Honestly it seems like if you actually wanted to hack a real game out of it, that it would be best to cut it down even further to about 64 pages. Scrap the archetypes, scrap the schticks, start over with basically the same core system and remake it with less/no fiddly bits. Kinda like this half assed bit here.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Yes, more simplification. Yes, serious trimming. No, not that much; 64 pages is probably too thin to do anything like the time-hopping action movie mashup setting here, and if we're ditching the setting along with the archetypes and schticks, just why are we sticking with this game instead of designing something else with dicepools?

What gets me is that when 2e went the "hey ebook pages are cheap" route and decided to add content by the shovelful instead of going all in on simplification they didn't really have the due diligence to support that. I mean it looks likely that their supposed playtest groups contained neither a typically devious optimizing powergamer nor any easily confused player types look over all the new crunchy bits. The game sorely needs a bunch of "wait, how does that actually work?" questions answered and it also needs a bunch of powergamer / charup stuff tweaked.

[Username17]

To be honest, I don't think there's any reason you can't put six archetypes on a page, and I think you don't need nearly as many archetypes as this edition (or even the last edition) chooses to offer you. While I can agree that the Awesoming Up stuff sounds less terribad than 1st edition's advancement rules, it's still shit. People should have more customizability in their starting character, and that means being able to swap skills and schticks around. And since a lot of the guns and martial arts characters are basically just the same thing with skills and schticks swapped around... there's not much sense in them being different. I can't tell a lot of the cop archetypes apart even when I'm staring right at them side by side.

When it all comes down to it, your only real challenge is to make characters who have both Guns and Martial Arts be balanced with characters who have one or the other. This is a quite difficult feat, considering that the game basically posits that you can use whatever combat skill you want and thus having a backup attack skill has basically the Monk problem (you're paying something to be better in a circumstance that is not supposed to occur). But it could be done. I can imagine a few ways to do it, and I don't think there's much use in it taking more than a page and a half to do so.

Bottom line: you need less schticks, less archetypes, and a simpler and more streamlined presentation. I am dead fucking serious when I say 64 pages. I'm thinking 5 pages of martial arts schticks, 5 pages of gun schticks, and 5 pages of magic schticks. And that's fucking it for schticks (although I would be OK with Martial Arts and Guns being increased to 6 pages at the expense of magic getting cut to 3). Supernatural critters can just have martial arts and magic. Cyborgs can just have martial arts and guns. And so on.

Basically, Robin Laws rants are lots of fun to read, but Feng Shui doesn't do itself any favors by not being written like a barebones ruleslite from 1987.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

I'm thinking 5 pages of martial arts schticks, 5 pages of gun schticks, and 5 pages of magic schticks. And that's fucking it for schticks (although I would be OK with Martial Arts and Guns being increased to 6 pages at the expense of magic getting cut to 3). Supernatural critters can just have martial arts and magic.

Okay, I made a new thread for discussing hypotheticals, but to tie this comment back into something review-like:

The Feng Shui 2 PDF has Guns Schticks on pages 123-127 (with a half-page illo in there, and only 3 schticks wrapping over onto page 127); Fu Schticks on page 139-146 (again with a half page illo in there) and Sorcery Schticks on 162-169 (with a pair of half page illos since Sorcerers > You ). And while columnation compresses text into fewer pages, that really is more than enough schticks for each of those.

[Josh_Kablack]

I wholeheartedly agree that Robin Laws's rants are fun to read. Which is why I mention that Blowing up the Movies dropped earlier today. And it could be the Gekkeikan Plum talking, but HOLY SHIT, this is what I wanted out of the core book.

Sample Excerpts:

So in Die Hard McClane isn’t just smart. He exists in a world of
idiots.

Maybe you could run it as a drunk Feng Shui one-shot, in which
you go around the table, playing out two-player duels......
<snip>
.....Abstemious readers will prefer to strive for an aesthetic, not biological,
state of inebriation.

Feng Shui presents a much simpler world than
the average RPG, yet conveying even in its basics in a screenplay is strikingly difficult. (He says, having tried and not particularly succeeded.)

For this we can be grateful to Wikipedia, which exists primarily to explicate the vertiginous intricacies of Japanese pop culture properties.

Prepare for the session by hitting up your favorite thesaurus site for
synonyms to the words brown, gray, dirty, decrepit and decaying.

A bit in the section on The Matrix does seem to support Schleiermacher's above hypothesis on Bullet Time, and there is a more than fair amount of shilling for other games Robin has been involved in, but overall you really should pick this up and read it.

[Josh_Kablack]

Chapter 7: Sorcery

Best Hits: Changing JMods, Removing the zillion instances of Sorcery AV vs Target Substat
Worst Flops: Complete lack of any destructive testing or even a powergamer/charop type reading these and asking if things are really supposed to work like that.

Okay, in 1e Sorcery was a power gamer's hidden cheese dream full of combat schticks that wortked with your Sorcery AV (13 or 15) against an opponent's substat (Never higher than 10, usually like 5 or 6), other schticks with noncombat utility which you totally got for free, and at some edge case rules that arguably let you get +Nd6 to a single roll. This was supposedly balanced by Juncture mods, -- which were straight numeric modifiers to AV which were beneficial in half the junctures and detrimental in the other half - so they weren't really a nerf so much a fiddily modifier to track. In 1e Feng Shui, the Sorcery rules had rather a lot of room for improvement.

One of the many gaps to fill

This section starts out with a section titled "describing spellcasting" which is about the V,S,M components of spellcasting in Feng Shui and what steps to take to prevent a sorcerer from casting spells written in a way that is beyond unhelpful and into actively damaging my understanding of how this is supposed to work. Yeah, I know how disarming a Killer or tying up a Martial Artist can work, and I accept that similar restraints on spellcasters should exist, and I further accept that this game is nominally rules-lite so your get magic-tea-party (or I guess antimagic tea party here) in place of crunchy rules for forcing concentration checks in combat. Still in a game with PC spellcasters you might want to spell out how it actually works since players do not have any common frame of reference for sorcery they way they do about guns and kung-fu kicks. Heck, with clear rules, you'd open up the possibility for PC sorcerers to stunt out of or around such restraints in clever ways, and that would make for a better game [/soapbox]

Next we get a section on Basic Sorcery Rules that Sorcery Schticks have either Fighting or Story Icons, and I flip the fuck out because Story Schticks are unique to Sorcery. As The Den has previously argued ad naseum, "Magic" is already the broadest conceptual space for abilities and has the most versatility with the least amount of narrative ingenuity required from the player to get any given result. Giving Sorcery a whole additional category of noncombat utility not possessed by any other Schtick type hardcodes such into the rules and exacerbates this disparity. LAGO can, has, and will again go into great depths about the roots of this and the damage it does to the hobby, but the basic argument is painfully straightforward: If everybody else has to solve non-combat issues via skill use, then Sorcerers should have to solve non-combat issues via skill use. If Sorcery includes Schticks to solve non-combat problems, then other Primary Attacks should include Schticks to solve non-combat problems. Fortunately, most of the actual schticks have only fairly minor "story" effects so this only offends my delicate sensibilities and doesn't completely reinforce caster/noncaster divide.

But once we get past the unfortunate idea that Sorcerers are better than you, things start to improve. Juncture Mods have been tweaked so that rather than mucking with the already iffy RNG, they now cause 3 wounds points in Magic Hostile Junctures or heal 3 wound points in Magic friendly Junctures - and they now only trigger when you actually spend a magic point on a Sorcery schtick. The wording could be a bit more clear, as it should be explicit that you can spend a Magic Point as a regular Fortune Die without worrying about J Mods, even when making an attack with Sorcery. But all in all, that's a good change. It simplifies things without the PCs having to worry about shifting AVs, and it enforces the setting conceit of "magic is hard here" better than the old +/- Ns did. It's not specifically addressed, but my reading of the rules interaction is that the minor healing in Magic Friendly junctures is still healing, so by the general rules, it removes any accumulated Marks of Death. Alas, the next chapter has the same shit work differently as regards Creature Powers, so Ghosts get to interact with two different J Mod Subsystems for no good reason.

Which is also why I bought this to drink

Then there's a small sidebar about swapping schticks if you're customizing, that says every sorcerer must always and forever have Chi blast, but if you've played before your Sorcerer can swap their other schticks out. That seems reasonable, but also forgets that the Magic Cop and Ghost Archetypes also get Sorcery Schticks and might want to customize at some point. Yeah, I know I ranted about this thing with the unattainable Guns Schticks and again how only two of the plethora of Martial Arts characters were allowed customization by the RAW, but it's worth a third rant. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with your proofreading and editing?

Sorcery schticks now fall into Specialties, which is a poor choice of name since a Specialty is actually the general category of magic that includes the particular schtick and similar schticks. In D&D terms, this would be a "school" of magic. This might seem a pretty significant nerf from 1e, where you basically got all options within what is now a Specialty for 1 schtick pick. However it's actually pretty minor since the Sorcer archtype gets a Schtick to spontaneusly cast any Schtick within a Specialty which they have 1 or more Schticks in at a cost of 2 magic points. That makes the nerf pretty minor for Sorcerers. The Ghost and Magic Cop are left to take the brunt of the nerfbat here.

Backlash is still here, it's just any way-awful failures with each given Specialty of Sorcery will have predefined consequences. This is where I scratch my head as Guns has rules for Jam or breakage on a way-awful failure, Sorcery has schtick-specific way-awful failure rules, and the MC will just wing it as reagards way-awful failures with other Attack Forms (even though Mutants get a whole Freaking Out Subsystem, that doesn't interact with critical failures). Really seems that these should be standardized where everybody has defined effects, or the MC wings it for everybody.

Then into the Schticks by specialty:

Blast - you shoot people with magic. Most of these have small riders you can activate by spending a magic point after you hit. A bunch of these give the battlefield a particular adverse condition for keyframe duration. Ice and Lightning Blasts have action denial riders that are based on target's Strength and Constitution "checks", which seems needlessly lengthy to resolve in a system where the average die result is +0. The better ones are Flying Weapon - which costs the target one shot on a hit without any need for Magic expenditure; Flesh Melter - which lets you spend magic to give Impairment to named foes (make sure your Guns buddy took Blam Blam Epigram) and Lucky 8 Blast - which lets you regain a Magic point on any outcome of 4 or more. That's a pretty sweet deal if used as intended and a one-schtick infinite Fortune Magic recharge engine if you go to the shootin' magic blastin' range. Remember that in magic-friendly junctures infinite Magic points automatically equals infinite healing between fights. That is unless your MC harshly enforces the Fightin / Story icons and holds you to the FFT "only in combat time" power use limit they imply.

Divination
This gets a lot weaker than it was in 1e, but only because of the Specialty/Schtick breakup. Most of these individually are barely worth a schtick pick and a lot are things player characters should probably be able to just do without needing Sorcery nor a schtick. Seriously, identifying which foes are Boss(es) and the direction to the nearest fight are things you want characters to auto-succeed at all the damn time. And spending a shot to know which enemy you have the best chance of hitting is an in genre tactical option for anybody that will make fights run faster. Disbelieving illusions on an expenditure of actions and/or Fortune is also something everybody should be able to do and not require a specific schtick - although I could maybe see an argument for magic characters getting to do it easier than others.

Ghost Sense makes no damn sense. I think Robin was drunk and watched the Odd Thomas movie, then wrote this hungover. Basically you spend a Magic point to see ghosts which can't help you, but they might help you. This cries out to be a "get a clue" schtick in a clue-accumulation investigation minigame that does not exist and wouldn't quite be appropriate for the tone of this RPG anyways.

Truthseek is only slightly less confusing. For 1 Magic you know if someone is telling you the truth as they know it. Or spend 2 Magic to know if they are telling you the real truth as they understand it. So apparently either "truth" &#8800; "real truth" or "know" &#8800; "understand". The real truth here is that I neither know nor understand any such distinctions.

I'm not sure, but I think I like the Prediction Schtick, where the a successful divination means that the MC hand picks a hexagram from the I Ching for you - that's a way to make divination cryptic, yet probably useful. The downside is that it requires the whole playgroup to learn a bunch of hexagrams.

Fertility
This gives you Bend Fate, an interrupt which costs a magic and 3 shots to give a foe an extra negative die. This might looks cool until you go back and reread that you can only apply one Interrupt per action and you can spend Fortune Dice on active dodges and boosts. So you could use the default rules to add 3+1d6 to your Defense for 1 magic and one shot, or you could use this schtick to reduce their attack by 1d6 for 1 magic and 3 shots. The default for Boosts is +3 to an ally's Defense for 3 shots, or +5 to that ally's defense if you spend a Fortune. So unless your MC wants to be a stickler about Defensive Boosts not getting the interrupt tag or you really want to penalize a foe's non-attack check this is spending a schtick to have access to numbers which are worse than the ones you had by default. My money is on the draft version of Bullet Time being something similar, but where Robin actually caught his own numerical comparison before the KS backer draft version.

De-Attunement is an attack against will resistance (so usually an easy target) that imposes impairment upon an enemy who is attuned to any Feng Shui sites. So this is something else you want a buddy with Blam Blam Epigramr for.

Doom Boon is a neat almost-rhyme name which grants you a full magic point recharge upon succeeding at an Up Check. That's kinda neat actually, and I wonder if perhaps everybody should recharge their Fortune the first time they succeed at one in a session? That would seem to support the heroic comeback trope better.

Fertility also has three different schticks allowing you to share the benefits of Boosts, but I don't quite think they combo, and really Aid Another just isn't exciting enough to be sinking multiple Schticks into, so this seems like padding the wordcount to me.

Healing: This is fragmented as shit to really hose Sorcery types what don't get Scroll of Spells. Seriously: Heal Wounds, Heal Object and Heal Vehicle are each a different schtick pick, there are two different schtcik picks for Negating a Foe Schtick that lasts past the end of a fight and Negating a foe schtick that expires at the end of a fight. Nevermind that a fully customized sorcery only gets 5 schticks to pick, while other spellcasting types only get new schticks via advancement. So you're likely looking at around 9 sessions into the campaign before your magic-cop can learn enough magic to heal a gunshot wound, negate a flashbang's effect on an ally and also counteract a poison dart. I am overwhelmed by how underwhelming that is.

Influence: This has a bunch of "Make a sorcery check against a target's Will Resistance" attacks. With the rules for enemy assymetry, that's less broken than the old edition, but still that's generally a 15 AV against a defense that's 5 for mooks, 7 for supporting, 12 for featured foe and 15 for bosses. So the Jedi mind trick works the vast majority of the time, love potions always work and you can implant memories with only the MC's interpretation of what exactly "positive or neutral light" and "strains credulity" mean.

Then we get to Illusion and Mind Control, each of which easily would have rated at least a "what were you smoking?" from any sort of quality control at all:

Illusion only works in non-combat "story scenes" which makes it slightly less breakable than D&D's Major Image. "Characters encountering the illusion make Notice Checks to identify it
as false; if successful, they know something weird or magical is going on." But the difficulty for such a check is not in fact listed anywhere. Is it the Sorcerer's AV, so you're looking at a 7 check vs a 15 Difficulty? Are we supposed to use the Sample Difficulty chart from back in Chapter 1 (remember all those meaningless adjectives)? Is there a default value for notice checks that didn't make it into the book?

It's really meta how the mechanics for illusions do not actually exist

But that's probably better than the next one. Mind Control has mechanics that are clear and comprehensible. Lemme just quote them:

When a Featured Foe declares an attack, spend 4 shots as an interrupt to choose a new hero, named character, or mook as target for the attack.

This makes Stave off Monkey look like weaksauce. You spend four shots whenever a named, non-boss opponent makes an attack and they are now attacking one of their allies. Doing so usually costs them 3 shots, so you're only down one shot for total negation of any attack while still getting an attack (albeit with that enemy's values instead of your own) Even better, if this is the way you're going, you're not really down shots, since you can always take interrupts, they just mortgage your future actions as an initiative penalty. So you interrupt every single named non-boss attack in the first sequence, and as per page 207 "A baseline fight involves as many featured foes as heroes, plus 3 mooks per hero", so in a 4-PC game with average initiatives, you get to take a -53 penalty to your second and third sequence initiatives, all the mooks are cleared by the end of the second sequence, with no-non mook attacks even targeting any PCs, and no possibility of the remaining foes' attacks even targeting the good guys after that. Not unless you interpret "new" in the description to disallow "why are you hitting yourself" usage here - in which case the fight resolves to all PCs (who have weathered one and a half sequences of mook attacks) vs one remaining injured featured foe. And while that is assuming baseline numbers and not the alternates with more mooks nor a boss swapped in - it's also assuming that the other 3 PCs just stand around and take no actions the entire fight.

On top of the mechanics issues in Influence, a bunch of these schticks just should not exist. Creating a Love potion is the sort of thing that happens once in a story as a plot device, not once per Magic point spent, allowing a PC to make multiple per session. Also, romantic subplots, even comic romantic subplots are not appropriate to all gaming groups due to issues Laws himself discusses in chapter 2 of Blowing up the Movies page 16).

Movement: This has seven schticks available:

• Flight which is useful but boring,
• two schticks that swap the target of an attack (freindly for friendly, hostile for hostile) - which are tactically interesting ways to manage aggro, but this isn't a tactical minis game and just the last page let us swap an attack targeting a friendly to target a hostile, so why do we care ?
• Slowdown, where you set your magic points on fire in hopes to deny an enemy future actions. Probably actually a good deal, but the risk of spending X magic on an attack that may fail is considerable.
• Muscular Infusion: where spend a magic point you give yourself or an ally 12 Strength ( or +1 Strength if it's already >= 12 )
• Remote Manipulation, which is kinda like mage hand but less explicit as I honestly don't know if you can lift an move your lightsaber with it.
• Far Lift, which is for lifting things up telekinetically, and I'm not sure how distinct it's supposed to be from Remote Manipulation. More cheese-worthy this can also be used in combat to drop heavy objects on foes - in which case you get to select the difficulty via a weight as difficulty slider, and then deal damage equal to the difficulty you set, but only hit if your result exceeds both the set difficulty and your target's defense (Protip: Choose a difficulty exactly equal to your target's Defense) Note that none of the named characters (hero archetype or enemy) in the book have defense below 12, so this is always at least 3 points more damaging than Blast, and against an Uber-Boss this beats out Sig Weapon: Shotgun.

Summoning: This is full of ways to hose Supernatural Creatures and Tranimals, some good, some rageworthy, but I've run out of ire, and this particular rant is months overdue, so I'm gonna leave it alone.

Next Time: Creature Powers.

[Josh_Kablack]

Chapter: I honesterly can't even count right now: Critter Powahs.

Best Hits: Inevitable Comeback
Worst Hits: Sorcery > You; Editing

Okay, first off, I am more prepared to write a review of this chapter than any other chapter. I rode over 30 miles today looking for ghosts in their home towns

This is me

,

and as per The Great Yokai Warwe know that supernatural creatures can only be seen be children and the very drunk. So I started out with a Mike's Harder Black Cherry Lemonade - which is sadly not as good as MacKenzie's Black Cherry Hard Cider - which I got carded for the first time in over a decade buying (so even if'n I'm not drunk enuff, maybe I get to count as young at heart face or something too) before I switched to Erdinger Dunkelwizen before leaving the bar. Then I got home and kicked my Geikken Plum. And then I staggered off to get a Twister's milkshake which I have now fortified with a generous double shot of 99 Whipped. I expect you, the reader to get in the (distilled) Spirit of things and drink along.

All ice cream needs this

This chapter starts off by kicking Supernatural Creatures in the nuts, then poking them with a cattle prod a few times to be sure.

If you are a Supernatural Creature, in your natural form, you're horrific looking and creep the heck out of people. So you don't get to be Lugosi's Dracula or the Bride of Frankenstein, or Edward Cullen or Angelina Jolie's Grendel's Dam or anything like that - to bad soo sad, nosexy, you're fugly. But you get a +2 Bonus to intimidate for this, which brings you to a 9, since Supernatural Creatures now start with no skills. Note that a 9 is one point less than having a friend who actually has the skill, so that's not much to get excited about. Heck, I don't think the "horrific appearance" stuff is supposed to apply to Ghosts, since the source ghost template is from Chinese Ghost Story, but it's not really clear. Speaking of unclear, the Supernatural Creature archetype listed back in chapter 2 has a schtick called "Gruesome Appearance" on his character sheet - this gives him an Intimidate value of 12 while in Monstrous Form. Note that neither the numbers nor the name line up with any of the rules in this chapter. This is where I drink and you should too. I want to hate on Colleen Riley, but then I remember things my name got attached too, so I'm actually more curious to ask her what went wrong that prevented her from doing any editing than I am ready to pin the blame for this sort of constant incompetence on her.

Next up you get 80s cheap effects flavor text rubbed all over you're supernatural creature with the "deceptive speed" paragraph. There's no reason that all PC supernatural creatures should have to move like a Romero zombie. At least someone had the sense to limit it to flavor text, but the game would still be improved by cutting it - you know, that process called editing, which apparently did not even happen here. Drink.

Next up are J Mods, which are here called Juncture Modifiers, even though they were called Juncture Penalties in the last chapter. Go editing go. Drink. Also, these work slightly different than last chapter, and since this isn't the chapter about magic-users, wizards, spellcasters Nicholas Cage they work worse for you. Drink. This time around it's either a +1 Toughness or a -1 Toughness in magic-friendly or magic-hostile Junctures. Note that a PC Nicholas Cage has rather a lot of control over whether or not JMods JPens come into play, since they can default to either Schticks that don't require Fortune Magic expenditure or ones that do depending on the Juncture they are in. In comparison Jpens Mods for supernatural critters come into play whenever an opponent hits them -- and it doesn't take a teetotaler to note that players have a heckuvajob Brownie more control over whether their characters expend Magic points than whether a foe hits them.

Probably the beer wine schnappsgoggles, but she looks hot to me. Laws' Probably used similar criteria in designing these rules

.

Oh wait, I'm making the rules too clear. The actual rules are that the Toughness modifiers only apply against Guns and Martial Arts attacks. So Sorcery, Scroungetech and Mutant attacks are unaffected. If this seems like splittings hairs for the sake of added complexity with in tracking a minimal modifier to you, that's because you are too sober. Drink.

But the chapter isn't done taspepperspraying supernatural creatures yet - you also get an immunity to being healed with the Medicine skill, unless the practitioner was trained in the Ancient or Netherworld Junctures. You can explicitly be healed by Healing Chi and Sorcery's Heal. Apparently someone forgot about Healing Petals, Ghosts' magic-point expenditure on Sorcery in Magic Friendly Junctures, Mutants' Silver Lining, and Scroungetechs Wound-Point swapping schticks which are all ways to heal that have been added in 2e. But back to the Medicine skill, none of the listed archetypes hail from the Netherworld, so that part might as well say "NPCs only" and of the 36 listed PC archetypes in chapter 2, only the Archer and the Sifu can start with Medicine and also can come from the Ancient juncture. And while a powergamer might notice that this is a distinct advantage to choosing an Ancient origin for a PC of those two archetypes, the reality is that Medicine skill is rare enough among PC archetypes that hosing it for "flavor" reasons is fiddly little bullshit which should have been cut edited out of this edition. Drink.

Now that I'm am sloshed enough to suspect the spirit of my window fan is communicating to me in it's secret secret thrumming language, we get to the creature schticks - which were the best part of 1e critters, you could do Creature from the Black Lagoon or Auhnold's Terminator or The villans from Wicked City or where the fuck is my spoon to finish this high proof shake? I know I brought one up here? Seriously, where the hell did I put it?
.....
.....
.....

Okay, schticks:

The creature version of Blast is arguably better than the Sorcery Version, but it sets an ugly precedent that other schticks follow. It does 11 damage in the first sequence, 10 in the second and 9 in any subsequent sequences. By comparison, Nicholas Cagery's Chi blast does only 9 damage, and schticks other than Chi blast have riders that can be activated for non-damage effects. That's not bad on the surface, it's a mild incentive for Supernatural Creatures to make attacks instead of slowing things down with active Dodging and defensive schtick. However the problem is that many Creature schticks work like this, getting progressively weaker later in the fight. This doesn't really reflect the source material, and amounts to alot of fiddly modifiers that decrease by a measly pooint every 3.16666666etc actions you take.

and by the rules, the players of Supernatural creatures are forced to care as well

It's like Laws forgot the lessons of 4e he inserted into the limits on Keyframe effects here, and it is precisely the thing that would have been caught by a good editor. Drink. Oh crap, I'm out of schnappsfortifiedmilkshake now, my poor liver.....
....
....
Back with some Wigle Rye - that's a whiskey that sort of came back from the dead, so it count's for the Ghost powers chapter, right?

Blood Drain allows you to add a D&D "vampiric weapon" style rider to any of your close combat Creature Powers attacks for 1 magic and 1 shot. That doesn't sound great, but remember that any healing removes Marks of Death.

Death Resistance comes in I, II, and III varieties, which give +2,+3 and +4 to Death Checks. I can only more clearly state my much earlier objection that if the initial schtick is worth +2 to something, then additional Schticks sunk into that same thing should probably also be worth +2 to that same thing, and that sinking more than half of a starting characters' allotment of schticks (even if customization worked as intended) into getting a +4 to a roll that you don't even make every fight is a very poor character build. With as harsh as Death Checks are, and with how other critter schticks let you ignore them, there's no reason for this to exist and having it be three schticks instead of one schtick that gives the +4 bonus is just adding sobriety to injury.

Exile from the Hell of Dismemberment is a hidden combo power that lets you remove a mark of Death from an ally and take it on yourself - 50/50 you gain it, 50/50 it just vanishes, but if you are building with this you shouldn't care. See Inevitable Comeback, Blood Drain, Regeneration, ally with Path of the Sword's Lethal Strike, etc,

Foul Spew is a little weird now in that it's a damage-shield slow effect instead of the "pick a status ailment" breath weapon it was in the old edition. With the flavor and mechanics so disassociated mismatched I don't think that all most groups will play with this as written.

Inevitable Comeback now works the way it should. Instead of the weird Magic-based additional Death Check that the old rules specified you now get to just spend 3 Magic after you fail a Death Check and wait for your buddies to say "No one could have survived that" or "This time, he's finally dead" and you get to come back, no roll or nuthin. This is either pwnsome with how awful Death Checks are to PCs, or totally useless with how chargen and advancement always allow you to reenter a game out to avenge the death of your identical twin sibling. But it works as it should now without the complicated subsystem. Good catch. Don't Drink. If this is pwnsome for gaming with your group, combo it with Exile from the Hell of My Liver Dismemberment to preserve all the PCs' continuity of character despite the craptacular Death Check rules.

Monstrous Foot Stomp is interesting in that it gives you a free Fortune die to hit and another free Fortune Die to Damage (which is not normally something that can happen) - however it requires you to have undergone a Transformation, so the shot cost is rather prohibitive. It also applies to any Creature powers attack:

This is the best way to increase your accuracy and damage with your lighting breath weapon

Natural Weapon is no longer stackable with itself. Nor is it called Abymsal Spines, and it now explicitly only applies with Creature Powers attacks. I can't care either way about any of these changes.

Regeneration comes in I, II, III and IV schtick flavoers, healing an inexplicable progression of 2,4,5,6 Wound Points at the start of each sequence. Even with four schticks sunk into this, that's not really enough to keep up with mook damage in combat, but it is enough to count as healing each sequence and presumably erase Marks of Death, although it would have been nice if that was explicit, or heck even if anything about how this functions out of combat was explicit. Does it default to the once-between-combats healing limit? Does it only work in combat sequences? The rules as written can support either of those interpretations, and I can see the rules as intended entailing other possibilities. Who's job is it to check for clarity? That's right, drink.

Schooled in the Hell of Piercing is interesting in theory, it seems like an edge case Big Bruiser hose, at least until I remember the actual rules and read the enemy stats and I cry into my retrothentic whiskey. If your target has Toughness of 7 or more, you treat their toughness as 5. This inexplicably makes Toughness 6 a sweet spot for foes, and there's no bloody reason that it couldn't have just reduced ( Toughness > X ) to (Toughness of effectively X ). But then enemy assymetry (drink) rears it's stinking ass and I skim the enemies chapter to realize that mookd do not have Toughness, only 1 of the 21 listed Featured Foes has a Toughness >= 7, and bosses (and uber-bosses)only increase toughness by 1, meaning that only 6 of the 21 types have toughness >=7 when advanced to boss or uber-boss. This is literally more complicated and also less powerful than a hypothetical schtick which would say "ignore any Foe schtick that increases Defense". Whose job is it to compare shcticks to stats? That's right: Drink.

Transformation: This is actually simplified from the old rules. It still basically reads "screw you, hippy, shoulda played a hoo-man like Gygax intended" Since Supernatural Creatures no longer have a Martial Arts backup AV and all automatically cannot trade-in have UNsexy appearance you will waste your first combat action Transforming into monster form, oh and by the way you are slower than anybody who isn't a Big Bruiser, and by the way several of your schticks decrease in effectiveness each sequence -- ( when no other schtick type works like that ). But I can't pick on the editing here, instead, this one I'm gonna blame on a playtester who didn't whine half loudly enough, or who may not have even existed.

And to end out the chapter, I guess I should gripe about Venom Sac. Forgo damage now to deal damage+5 in another 5 shots. That' probably balanced, but it's another fiddly little 4e D&D timing tracking small modifer thing that really shouldn't happen in an even nominally rules-lite game...

And aside from the various less-than-noteworthy, less-than-objectionable schticks I skipped over, that's the chapter, finish your drinks, and once your hangovers fade suggest some future wasteland sorts of booze for the upcoming Mutant and Scroungetech chapters, cuz Critter powers Tranimal Schticks is gonna go by quick.

[momothefiddler]

which is sadly not as good as MacKenzie's Black Cherry Hard Cider

One of my favorite drinks! Also good work on the review. I enjoy reading it; I just don't have anything to say about it.

[Username17]

Basically what I wanted from Feng Shui 2 I didn't get. I wanted it to be faster and simpler and more user friendly. And while there are some notable good changes that go in that direction, the overall arc of change is towards more fiddly poorly conceived bullshit and higher barriers to entry for the game. This book reads like a random dude on the internet's 10 years of half-baked Feng Shui house rules.

-Username17

[Mask_De_H]

As far as I can tell: faster, simpler and more user-friendly is not the way TTRPGs are trending. Quite the opposite, even for supposedly simplified systems like D&D and Shadowrun's Fifth.

This might be brand inertia, it might be designers just not knowing how to do simple, or it might be q combination of tbs two.

[OgreBattle]

So how should venom 'damage over time' effects be handled in a rules lite Feng Shui game

[DrPraetor]

So how should venom 'damage over time' effects be handled in a rules lite Feng Shui game

Short answer: they shouldn't. This is easy in a Feng Shui game because the genre conceits are that being "slowly poisoned to death" is a melodramatic hook and not a game mechanic. In a game where you should roll to see if you have run out of ammo, you are most certainly NOT keeping track of how much your lifebar has been reduced by poison.

In a rules-lite which is more gritty, damage still isn't going to be "damage over time" (because that is fiddly and not rules-lite), you are going to have a status and you are going to make checks periodically to see if it gets worse, probably with only three grades of severity:
Level 1 - Aieee! I'm poisoned!
Level 2 - Seriously penalized, -1 standard deviation on many or most things (spend a true grit to ignore)
Level 3 - Comatose, feverish, other PCs have to drag you around in a desperate effort to save you (spend a true grit to take some action anyway)

In your post-apocalyptic rules-light, you would use the same mechanic for exposure to radiation, the zombie virus, and any other source of creeping dread future debilitation.
In a rules-lite, counting off a pip of stamina every hour is right-out; likewise, having different rules for plutonium and rattlesnake venom.

[virgil]

As far as I can tell: faster, simpler and more user-friendly is not the way TTRPGs are trending. Quite the opposite, even for supposedly simplified systems like D&D and Shadowrun's Fifth.

This might be brand inertia, it might be designers just not knowing how to do simple, or it might be q combination of tbs two.

Odd, I was getting the opposite feeling. Faster & simpler is the battle cry for stuff like FATE or BearWorld. It's the official reasoning for 5E being the way it is. This may be conflating simpler and faster with "DM Fiat" and "lazy designers".

[Josh_Kablack]

So how should venom 'damage over time' effects be handled in a rules lite Feng Shui game

The Archer already has a reasonable damage over time schtick - when they deal damage to an opponent, they can spend three shots and 1 Fortune to deal that same damage again. That's actually simpler than a normal attack, since it bypasses the future dice rolls and Tughness subtraction steps. Another reasonable mechanism for poison would be to have it grant Impaiirment for the rest of the fight / until healed. That way a poisoned character gets hit more often and takes more damage from each hit, which has about the same synergy with other sources of damage that a D.o.T. effect would - the only difference is that there is no chance Impairment by itself takes an opponent who slinks off down after the fight.

It might also be reasonable to design a game with an explicit bookkeepping phase betweenn rounds to standardize durations in a non-befuddling way - and in such a system, D.o.T. effects would tick in this upkeep / cleanup / post-phase 12 part of the turn. But that is not the way Feng Shui 2 went, nor would it result in anything I would call rules-lite.

[Username17]

As far as I can tell: faster, simpler and more user-friendly is not the way TTRPGs are trending. Quite the opposite, even for supposedly simplified systems like D&D and Shadowrun's Fifth.

This might be brand inertia, it might be designers just not knowing how to do simple, or it might be q combination of tbs two.

Odd, I was getting the opposite feeling. Faster & simpler is the battle cry for stuff like FATE or BearWorld. It's the official reasoning for 5E being the way it is. This may be conflating simpler and faster with "DM Fiat" and "lazy designers".

Faster and simpler is a battlecry because everyone understands that faster and simpler is a good thing. But it's also a battlecry in the way that supporters of the PATRIOT Act crow about "freedom." In that people very frequently offer the exact opposite of that and say they are supporting it anyway because buzzwords are as important to marketing than realities. Let's not beat around the book, the amount of text padding in FATE and Bear World is insane. The Dresden Files Your Story book (the book that is more rulesish than the Our World book, not that there aren't rules in the Our World book) is so big and heavy that you could use it for a murder weapon. Fucking Bear World is nearly 300 pages long.

The overwhelming direction has been for RPG books to get longer and more full of text bloat. And for that, we basically have to blame desktop publishing. It's just easier to write text and have it appear in book format than it used to be. Back in the 90s, a manuscript would need to be retyped into its printable form. That meant that there was a mandatory period of editing and review as the draft got converted into a printable form. Now text is just selected and fonts are applied. So half assed thoughts from early in development can just cling like limpets to the final product without every being reviewed or considered near publication time.

This fact of low effort translation of half-baked keyboard musings to "finished" book chapters has made RPG books a lot more like collections of blog posts - with the entirely predictable bloat and lack of give-a-shit that would entail.

Games need more design and less words. But unfortunately they are getting exactly the opposite of that.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Chapter 10: Tranimals.

Sadly, I need to write this one sober -- that's the price of working weekends. But I'm still including prompts for when you, the reader should drink, and I promise you that when I go back in to edit I will follow those prompts myself sticking to animal booze like Old Crow and DogfishHead and did I mention that a relative gets a cut whenever you buy Scorpion Mezcal?

Figure 10-a: Shameless Plug

Best Hits: Omni Schticks, The Mini-Archetypes Sidebar
Worst Misses: Reversion Rolls still exist, Reprinting same schticks to burn page count, Schtick naming issues

Okay, there are basicaly five things in this section: Reversion, Omni Schticks, Transformed Crab Schticks, Things for Transfromed Dragons to Drool Over, and Mini-Archetypes which prove that less is more.

Up first: Reversion

I would rather use this political cartoon than the actual rules

You accumulate reversion points from being exposed to magic Gygaxian dickery. Reversion points do not reset between sessions and instead carry over, because let's add accounting. At the end of each session, you make a Defense check against your number of accumulated reversion points. There's a parenthetical that says this is redundant if you're reversion point total is zero, which since "zero" is otherwise a valid value for a difficulty seems to foreshadow really bad understanding of math to come, but at least it means you don't revert by accident without any reversion points. If this succeeds, you subtract the outcome from your accumulated reversion points, if it fails you suffer a "reversion crisis". The first reversion crises is flavor for your way-awful failures. The second triggers a subplot adventure. The third reversion crisis is: pass in your character sheet, do not pass go, do not collect $200 dollars.

You can never gain more than one reversion point per fight, and you can gain one reversion point per between-fight scenes, so with the suggested three-fight structure you're looking at a bad case of maybe 5 reversion points in a session. Of course the worst case is session with scenes in a setup-fight-setup-fight-setup-fight-wrapup order and events entirely in the Netherworld, which could give you 11 reversion points in a single session. Oh but it could get even worse, since Transformed dragons have a wildcard schtick that can in some cases give tham 1 point per use.

But in the moderately common , but not especually hosey case where you have a tranimal in a PC group that also includes a ghost, sorcerer, or supernatural creature, your TranDragon or TranCrab will be gaining 4 or 5 reversion points each session, and making a check with their 13 or 14 defense. Let's assume they are looking at the midpoint of a -9 target number meaning that they have a 94.7619% chance of passing any individual check and a 50/50 odds of having failed one by session 12. Oh wait, it's worse than that, because there is a 7.1429% to 15.7143% chance that the outcome of any individual check will not be enough to eliminate all reversion points and some points will carry over to next session's check, making the odds worse and also slippery sloping the odds that more points will carry over to further future checks.

Now the good news here is that unlike Death Checks, there's no prohibition against using Fortune on your reversion checks, and since the checks are explicitly made at the end of the session, the only reason not to do so is because you spent all your fortune previously. The better news is that your first advancment is going to be Human Essence, which lets you spend a Chi to remove two reversion points, with no shot cost nor use limit - and from then on you will empty your Chi at the end of the session, saving your last for a Fortune die on the check, but using the rest to lower the difficulty of your Reversion check.

The bad news here is that this fucking subsystem even exists. It's a early 90s improvement on Palladium insanity rules and WoD humanity. I mean the math isn't rage worthy in the common case and most Tranimal players will only see the strike one crisis in a typical campaign, but why are you adding any sort of "at the end of each session roll for your character's continued existence" mechanic to an RPG. I am deeply offended by the idea of "roll percentile, on a low roll gain a strike, three strikes and you have to generate a new character."

And that is exactly what this system is. It's inimical to any ideal of co-operative storygaming and there is no system for numeric inputs which makes it acceptable for such a thing to exist.

If the idea was to use random rolls to enhance dramatic tension in the game, that's best done through randomness that does not risk ruining character continuity. If the intent was to players the thrill of push-your-luck powers with a chance of future reprucussions, then players need a heckofajob brownie more control over how and when they accumulate reversion points and the worst-case consequences need to be a lot less final. And yes, I understand that the game rules totally allow and support the immediate creation of an identical twin character at the same level advancement total as a workaround, but that goes from savvy workaround for a bad rule to trite cliche of the entire game system after the first time it happens in a given campaign. Giving players replacement clones works for Paranoia where the point is lethal slapstick, it doesn't work for melodrama where the stakes are supposed to be feel high.

Anyhoo, next are Omni Schticks :

Which are schtciks any Tranimal, regardless of lineage can take. These are mainly things that muck with reversion points and/or give minor bonuses against Sorcery and Creature powers, and most are ok. As I noted above, you are going to take Human Essence at your first advancement. But the idea here is great. There should be schticks that all Tranimals can take. That gives each Tranimal PC more options while limiting the number of speshul snowflake feat chain to burn page count on. Probably a lot more of the you are fast / strong armored and other common things should have gone here since those can generally be applied to damn near any totem animal and it would have simplified things. But we already know that this edition went for bloating the page count, so the fact that the book contains Fast, Fast, Fleet Very Strong, Very Strong, Extremely Strong, Shell I, Shell II, Shell III, Shell I, Shell II Shell III, Scuttle, Scuttle, Riveting Gaze and Hypnotic Sidling reprinted in their entirety under different animal listings should not be a surprise at this point.

Moving on to specific animal types, I'm gonna cover the two fleshed out archetypes of Crab and Dragon and then talk about the mini-archetypes hidden in this chapter, where players looking to create a character are unlikely to see them.

Transformed Crabs

En Garde Bitches!

TranCrabs have a total of 11 form-specific schticks to pick from, and that's not an outlier from the other Tranimal schtickblocks. Even if customization worked as it should that's nutzoid. You don't need so many form specific schticks that two different Tranimal PCs of the same lineage can have no overlap. And with Omni Tranimal and Fu schticks available as for advancement options you don't need to stretch things out so that it takes over a semester of weekly play for a completionist player to fill in the checklist on their base form. With 5 schticks at start, you would want between 6 and 9 schticks for each creature type to allow both diversity and similarities within the same type - or at least you would if customization actually functioned and Omni schticks did not exist. Without customization, it doesn't even matter since defaults are locked in by the rules as written. Ignoring that wrinkle, the inclusion of Omni schticks means that you could go significantly lighter on form specific schticks amd have less repetition, more consistancy between characters and fewer opportunities to fuck up the editing. If I was writing this, I don't think any totem would get more than 2 form-specific schticks, and they would pull the rest from more general lists. You know, like how very few of the archetypes back in chapter 2 get more than 2 signature schticks and most pull the rest of their schticks from the Guns/ Fu / Sorcery / Critter schticklists. Doing things that way preserves some uniqueness of each archetype while increasing resusability, lowering bloat and resulting in fewer speshul snowflake rules for play groups to learn each time a new archtype is player. But I think I have harped on that before.

Figure 10-e: Being Four Harps

Transformed Crabs get the schtick Fast, which is crazy-go-nuts, letting you spend X chi to gain +2X to an initiative roll. So if you are willing to set you're their Chi on fire, that's a 22+1d6 initiative. Bring a buddy with the top tier Path of the Fox Fu schtick to share that and you each get to attack roughly 4 times before even fast characters get to go. Even if you're not burning all your Chi / don't have a recharge engine build it's still more efficient to spend one or two here, burn the extra actions on shots for Dodge than it is to spend Fortune on Dodge directly or to even bother using your Shell schtick. It's kind of telling how the default TranCrab back in Chapter 2 doesn't have this, and I suspect a real playtest would have set X at some fixed value and/or limited this to only working in sequences after the Nth.

TranCrahs also get Pincer, which is an extra damage unarmed attack which increases the shot cost of the next attack made by its victim - it's noncumulative but it extends your action economy advantage.

Since it's noncumulative, Scuttle is the third part of the combo - it's a +2 Martial Arts bonus against named characters if your prior attack was against a different named character. (Note that it's not limited to "this fight" or anything, so be sure to end fights by whacking at a named character to preserve the bonus )

Transformed Dragon Combos:

I'm gonna add a lengthy powergamer digression about Transformed Dragon builds. These are a bit silly and hypothetical as there is no explicit permission for customizing a TranDragon, and even if there was, TranDragons only start with three schticks, so getting these set up involves 3-10 advancements, which is going to be somewhere between one semester and a full calendar year of weekly play. But hey the point of Transformed Dragons in Feng Shui has always been dreaming up what pwnsomeness you could do with enough advancement, so here's my first stab in the new edition:

Your Trandragon is either going to build around Omnicompetent to auto-win at noncombat skills or they are going to dumpster dive through other Tranimal packages and Fu paths for combat power. For 1 Chi, Omnicompetent gives you a skill rating of 15 in a single skill (provided no other PC has a rating of more than 13 in that skill) with a skill list of 12 + Info skills, that's pretty broad coverage, and a 15 is the top number for starting characters.

The Omnicompetant build advancement path involves taking TranFox's Very Clever (Autosucceed at a single noncombat check for 1 Chi), then probably Prodigious Leap and Aerial Pushaway for Chi recharge -- ( although you could go with Corners of the Mouth if an ally has a better Fortune Engine than that.) and you top it off with the TranTortoise's Wisdom - which lets you spend a Chi to psuedosucceed at a knowledge / contact check which another player has just failed. Congrats, your character is truly a know-it-all.

For combat power you can either go fast or slow:

The fast build involves stacking TranScorpion Sudden Jab with TranSpider Pounce with (Two different schtitcks that do the same thing) with TranCrab/TranMonkey Fast so that you get +6+2N to your initiative when using Martial Arts so you go first and get at least 2 standard attacks off before any non-charoped build gets to act. Then you cherry pick action-economy schticks (Mesmerizing Dart, TranCrab Pincer, TranBear Slap, TranScorpion Slowing Strike, etc) to leverage this advantage and widen the gap. Possibly you add on TranScorpion Surprise which gives you +2 Martial arts against foes who have yet to attack, possibly you don't need it. Overall it's a good build, but being relatively straightforward it's not as cheeseypowerful as the slow build.

The slow build revolves around TranFox's Fleet / TranSnake's Fast: which do the same thing --

Wait stop yes, this section includes both schticks that have different names (TranFox Fleet / TranSnake Fast) and do the same thing as each other and it also has other schticks which have the same names and do different things than each other (Tran Crab Fast / Tran Snake Fast). Such should also not be a surprise to you at this point into the review.

But anyway, Fleet costs one Chi to trade your initiative for that of another combatant. Not copy, swap. Then you get TranSnake's Riveting Gaze and Stave off Monkey
During the first sequence you use Riveting Gaze (Spend 6 shots, chosen opponent loses 6 shots, no roll, no Chi cost) any time you get an action and you interrupt any attack against you with Stave off Monkey (Shot cost 5, no chi cost) and the first attack against With a little massaging of the action rules (see my prior post about cheesing Drunken Master) you can guarantee a worst case of using Riveting Gaze on shot 1 of the first sequence, for at least a -5 initiative penalty for the second sequence, and hopefully your interrupt gets you a bigger penalty. Because in sequences two and three you want to roll as low an initiative as possible - you're spending a Chi to trade it away to the enemy with the highest initiative, so it's basically a damage immunity double-stunlock combo. Later you can add on Tran Dragon Lightning Response to be able to switch out damage immunity for 0-shot cost counterattacks later in the fight.

Mini-Archetypes

But moving past the two fleshed out Tranimal archetypes, this section also includes 8 more Transformed Animal "mini-archetypes" and it fits all eight of them onto about 2/3rd of a page, proving Frank's prior point. Although each also has about half a page of unique but actually repeated snowflake schticks -- I already 'splained how those could be condensed. There's also a "these aren't tested now tuned" warning on the page, but given the quality of testing and tuning in the rest of the book, that's really not saying much. Heck, these have better skill selection process and better customization in the rules as written that the fleshed out archetypes. My major gripe here is that the eight selected animals are less than ideal.

You can't do this group, because Tiger, Mantis and Crane are missing.


You can't do this group either, because Centipede, Toad and Lizard are missing.


You can't even do this group since Rat is missing.

The obvious fit is probably the Chinese Zodiac, but there are multiple overlapping 5-teams with significant cultural traction here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Animals - and it's a travesty that the game does not include a complete set for any or them. It and even bigger travesty that the game does not any rationale for which animals it did select for inclusion.

and I have a smaller secondary gripe that the allowable Fu Schticks are start prevent a Transformed Fox from knowing Path of the Fox Fu Schticks. Honestly, that path should be named something else if you also have Transformed Fox martial arts schticks in your game. If you are buying chi-fueled Martial Arts powers then you shouldn't need to specify which type of Fox powers they are.

and that's the chapter. Finish your drink and seriously, suggest me some post-apocolyptic drinks for the next two chapters

[Josh_Kablack]

I have an overly long rant about the undefined rules and powergamer combos for the Gene Freak / Mutant Archetype that I'm in the process of working into shape. But I think my basic point is better made with a table comparing the list of Mutant Schticks listed in the Gene Freak Archetype's Awesoming Up section back in Chapter 2 to the list of Mutant Schticks actually described in Chapter 11:

Archetype Advancements List	Given in Chapter	My Best Guess for the discrepancy
Acid Blood,	Acid Blood
Adaptive Enzymes,	Adaptive Enzymes
Brain Bleed,	Brain Bleed
+++	Berserk Rage	Default Pick, so cannot buy again with advancement
________	Blinkshifter	You must have blinked, because it shifted out of allowable advanements.
Causal Leakage,	Camouflage	See below
Camouflage,	Casual Leakage	Alphabetic Order is sooo complicated
________	Channel Pain	Mixup with Pain Eater, which is a default schtick pick
Chronofuxor	Chronofuxor
Empathy	Empathy
_______	Endocrine Pulse	Too Powerful, Banned From Use
Eyes on the Back of Your Head	Eyes on the Back of Your Head
_______	Fear Shift	Schticks nobody can take are on purpose?
+++	Force Shield	Default Pick, so cannot buy again with advancement
Gene Link	Gene Link
Go Cartilaginous	Go Cartilaginous
How Magnets Work	How Magnets Work
______	Impossibilist	Self referential humor makes this impossible to gain
Mjolnirification	Mjolnirification
Mushy Head	---	This was a description of the author's mental state not meant to make it into the schtick list
Nanoportal	Nanoportal
Noctilucent,	Noctilucent,
+++	Pain Eater	Default Pick, so cannot buy again with advancement
______	Precognative Rescue	If you were precognitive, you could have rescued this
______	Probability Wave	It's probable this waved byebye
Psychic Vampire	Psychic Vampire
+++	Push	Default Pick so cannot buy again with advancement
Radioactive Exudation	Radioactive Exudation
______	Recuperate	Maybe these two just switched names?
Reactive Epidermis	_____	Maybe these two just switched names?
Resource Sniff	Resource Sniff
Shared Sight	Shared Sight
Shift Coordinates	---	Likely this was renamed Blinkshifter
Silver Lining	Silver Lining
Skulky	Skulky
_____	Slow Burn	What this sort of editing does to my temper.
_____	Some Damn Thing With Playing Cards	Got the "Damn" right at least
Teleread	Teleread
Shift Coordinates	---	Copypasta error has nonexistant schtick listed twice in section of book
Titanium Mind	---	Like a steel trap, in that you can't print it over the internet
----	Ultragloat	What Robin did with the Kickstarter Money instead of paying a proofreader
Unsplode	Unsplode
Vestigial Twin	Vestigal Twin
+++	Very Fast	Default Pick, so cannot buy again with advancement
+++	Very Strong	Default Pick, so cannot buy again with advacnement
----	Wiggly Air	If you are drunk enough to see the air wiggle, you won't notice that this is missing
----	Why I Oughtta	What you should say to the author, editor and proofreader of this book.

So yeah, this isn't just about schticks nobody can take by accident or missing schtick descriptions because the lists don't match up as printed. But going beyond that the number missing on each side doesn't match - because nobody bothered with checksums (let alone a side by side lists like this post), and the advancement list fails at both simple alphabetical order and successful copypasta. Even more galling, the whole issue could have been sidestepped by writing the simpler and more straightforward "any Mutant schtick not already possessed" in place of a list of individual schticks in the Awesoming Up section.

This sort of overall sloppiness and failure of organization and editing is not unique to this archetype nor schtick type, and indeed the pervasive sloppiness in the final production version is greatly ire-inspiring and makes it very hard for me to see the game for what it is, let alone what it was supposed to be.

[Josh_Kablack]

Chapter 11: Doing a half-assed job of ripping off the X-Men

Best Hits: Powergamer Comboes, Hakim Stout
Worst Flops: Speshul Snowflakiness, Undefined Rules,

Okay, before we begin, think back to Chapter 2. There is only 1 of 36 Archetypes who gets Mutant Schticks - you are in extra speshul snowflake territory here. And numeric comparisons makes it look like that's the short-bus form of "speshul"as the Gene Freak Archetype has a mere 13 Mutant Attack, 13 Defense (Only Better than Big Bruiser and Ghost), 6 Toughness (Only better than Old Master and Scrappy Kid) Speed 6 (Only better than Big Bruiser), and no backup attack value nor noncombat skills. So you are tied for worst-of-those-for-whom it isn't a drawback in every category save for your Fortune substat. There you get a 9, tying you with the Everyday Hero and Scrappy Kid, for most points in the core book. Of course they are called Genome points, -- I can only guess that

Biome ,


Phoneme,

or


Manxome

were never considered as alternate terms here, since any of those would be better. And of course your type gets to have a power-schedule drawback that penalizes you for actually spending those points which are your archetype's major stat advantage. Because FUCK YOU with oldskool funk for helping this hit the KS stretch goal.

Freakout rolls:

After you use a Mutant power which costs Genome points or requires a check (that's most of them) roll 1d6, if you roll higher than your remaining Genome points, previously determined random bad thing happens. (attack ally, heal foe, cause ally to lose 3 shots, foe gets free 0-shot attack). This can't happen more than once per fight, and it can't happen in the first sequence and it can't happen if you have 6 or more Genome points remaining. So you really only want to never spend more than 3 of your Fortune Substat points anyways and take either passive boost schticks or break the game with a recharge engine rather than play as intended. You can't even do something halfway like opening up with Mutant buffs and then switching to your Uzi or Super Sledgehammer to avoid Freaking Out in this fight , because Gene Freaks do not get any sort of Backup Attack. Overall, this is still better than the Tranimal Reversion system and it's less exceptionful than Sorcery Backlash. Despite the "how dare you use the one stat you're good at" design, this subsystem is only about on par with Creature Powers JPens JMods or the Guns Jamming rules in that it's a random-roll player hose that conflates extra accounting with added drama. There's really no need for a half-dozen different random power failure risk systems in this game and while this one is not the worst of the lot, it's still bad and here it feels very tacked on.

More of this in quality control means less of it at your game table

The Schticks are probably the least-rules savvy schtick set in the entire game, which is really shocking since ostensibly they were written by Robin as a Kickstarter Stretch goal after the post-playtest Gamma rules were already in place. But this means that they are full of both confusing instructions and a couple decent ways for powergamers to bend the game pretty hard.

Let's start with durations: Berserk Rage, Force Shield, and Very Fast all have "End of Sequence" duration. Therefore you want to use them on your first shot of the sequence and they can be stacked. Conversely: Camoflague, Gene Link, How Magnets Work, Radioactive Exudation and Wiggly Air - all have Keyframe durations, meaning you don't care where in the sequence you use them, but they can't be stacked. Was this intentional design carefully balancing things or was it the author forgetting his own ruleset from schtick to schtick? There's no telling, but the end result is a confusing mismash of 4e style varying durations on buffs that give +1s to different things.

But then lets move into the reasons why you might actually want to play an X-Men Knockoff despite the lacklustre statline.

First and Foremost, you are going to get your grubby mitts on The deathproof infinite Mana infinite healing combo. This starts with the schtick Adaptive Enzymes, which removes 10 of your wound points when you take a Mark of Death - and remember the actual rules

If a character is healed before he makes a Death Check, he doesn’t need to make the check.

so this schtick makes you immune to dying in this game, which is decent.

This could be your character

but if you are playing one of the Y-men, you are going to combo it with the Schtick Endocrine Pulse, which lets you spend 1 shot and take a Mark of Death to gain 5 Manxome points. This is among the best infinite Fortune engine builds in the game, since for just two schticks you have complete control over the trigger and it includes decent in-combat healing.

Then once you have the deathproof unlimited recharge self-healing engine you are either going to go offense or defense.

The offense build is pretty simple, you take the schticks Very Strong for melee damage on par with the big bruiser and Push for ranged blasting that's basically an unlimited ammo, never jams .357 magnum with a knockback rider (which doesn't make sense in a map-agnostic system, but whatever). You probably also take either Very Fast for the almost-one-full additional attack average per sequence and Berserk Rage for the increased AV. Then with later advancement you think about layering Recuperate on top of it so that you have an even-faster healing option available.

The defense build is a bit more interesting, but involves significant risk, since you need active shots to recharge and heal, but otherwise you are willing to mortgage your future initiative on interrupts to be the lynchpin of the party. UnSplode lets you completely negate any explosion as a 1 shot interrupt for 1 Genome Precognative rescue lets you negate wound points from a non-attack, non-explosion damage source to zero for 1 Genome point and no shot cost, and Chronofuxor is a 1 shot, 1 Genome (iff it helps) interrupt that makes an enemy reroll their Swerve whenever they deal wound points. If you can afford the Genome points, these make you and your allies immune to non-attack damage and cuts the number of attacks which hit roughly in half. But that's only five schticks, and the Gene Freak starts with 6 Mutant Schticks (plus Mutant Punch, which is a signature schtick), so if customization is allowable you have a slot left. Your "offense" here is the horribly-named schtick "Some Damned Thing With Playing Cards" Which is a no-Fortune interrupt that grants an ally a zero-shot attack when they miss. Note that it's not merely a reroll, but a new attack. So if that attack misses, you can trigger this again, and if that attack misses, you can trigger this again, and so on until it hits. As intended, using 2 (1 with Very Fast) of your shots to give an ally a zero-shot second chance is a mediocre deal unless they are using Mesmerizing Dart or something else with an effect on a miss, but remember that you can spend more actions than you have on interrupts by mortgaging your next initiative result without limit. So if you are willing to give up potential recharge actions, you can use this power to make all your allies always hit, which is pretty cool after you've made them immune to non-attack damage nigh-immune to mook attacks and roughly twice as evasive against attacks from named characters. With advancement you take Eyes in the Back of your head to auto-succeed at Notice checks and make the party immune to getting surprised.

And that's most of what you as a player need to know about Mutants. Oh sure; there's a brief "Description only mutations" section at the end which basically says "we made horrific appearance mandatory for Supernatural Creatures, but its also an optional Melodramatic hook for mutants" while saying nuthin about characters having three boobs.


But as a Denizen, I am compelled to go into lengthy explanations of the failures of many remaining schticks. If you enjoy my nitpicking or want to haggle Robin Laws at a convention, you can keep reading. Otherwise, just skip ahead to my next post.

Blinkshifter. This lets you teleport between vehicles in a chase scene. It also means you don't need to pay a shot cost for moving between areas in the "fight zone". Wait what the fuck is a fight zone? Wait, there are supposed to be shot costs for purely movement actions? Where the fuck are those rules, because they damn sure ain't back in the combat chapter.

Berserk Rage: For one shot and 1 Manxome, you can make your primary attack a 15 until end of sequence. You know, the same sort of 15 that the Martial Artist has without spending anything despite them being a point faster, 2 points dodgier and 2 points tougher than you.

Brain Bleed. This ranged attack would be pwnsome if it had a damage value. But it doesn't so instead you get to make a 3 shot attack that if it hits costs your target an average of 1.5 shots. Apparently the extra half shot of average delay here is worth giving up the 9 Base Damage that Blast; Flying Weapon had back in the Sorcery Chapter.

Camouflage. Conceptually neat, but the flavor text about sneak attacks does not match the mechanics of free fortune dice when dodging ranged attacks. Also, if you are playing a Gene Freak, you are doing it for the easy infinite Manxome engine and have all the fortune dice you want to spend on Dodges already - which shouldn't be many, since your Speed is in the basement.

Causual Leakage - this triggers when a Boss succeeds at an Up Check. Note first that Bosses do not actually follow the Up Check rules and have an even/odd roll instead. Note also that even if this is supposed to trigger on that even/odd roll, the suggested fight design guidelines have a boss showing up about once every three fights, so that this would activate maybe once every other game session, save that sometimes bosses will win, flee or surrender, so realistically it's more like once every four sessions that this even comes into play. See also the Schtick Why I Oughtta

Empathy and Shared Sight. Of these two similar noncombat schticks, the one that can be triggered more than once per session is clearly superior, but the even bigger deal is that they aren't a single schtick to begin with.

Chronofuxor - this forces a foe to reroll their swerve when they deal damage, which sounds fine until you read the Foe Schticks section and see that Foe Schticks which cause damage without rolling for it exist and cause UNDEFINED ERROR IN GAME RULES.

Eyes on the Back of your Head. The flavor here is dumb. Autosuccess on notice checks is not.

Fear Shift - when an ally takes a Mark of Death, give an ally a boost at no shot cost. This is minor but note that your own recharge engine works off giving yourself Marks of Death, so a pair of Mutants hands out Aid Another actions when one recharges ( See also Creature Empathic Rage, Exile from Hell of Dismemberment, Path of the Sword's Lethal Strike )

How Magnets Work - Force a foe to stay in Close combat range of you. For another UNDEFINED ERROR IN GAME RULES combine with Masked Avenger's Tremble Evildoers!, Scroungetech Cortisol Field Generator or any other "make a foe Cheese it" schtick.

Impossibilist - increase the shot cost of a stunt attack by 1 to get a free fortune die on that stunt. Wait, there are TWO sets of stunt rules now, how does this interact with the one where you get to retroactively add a stunt benefit to a high outcome roll? Someone who knew the rules might have addressed that, so of course it isn't even mentioned here.

Mjolnorification - This seems simple on the surface, but I am confused how it compares to Rearm checks and whether it's inferior to using the bonus die from Impossibilist on a stunt attack to rearm. Whether this even matters is going to depend how your table interprets the Guns rearming rules as applied to melee weapons. (Remember that Gene Freaks do not get a Guns AV, because the footnote makes it look like the author thought they did)

Nanoportal. This has clearer wording, costs one less shot, and one more Fortune Substat when compared to Sorcery mind control. Note that requiring the point expenditure means you cannot do it indefinitely and you actually care when your initiative penalty gets into the double digits.

Noctilucent - you and allies do not suffer adverse penalties from the adverse condition darkness. Wait, what happened to immunity bonuses?

Pain Eater - when you or an ally increases a foes impairment you regain Genome points. if you have a sorcerer buddy with De-attunement or Fleshmelter this is a solid recharge schtick. Oddly the wording makes it incompatible with the Scrappy Kid's Distraction ability.

Psychic Vampire - if the Endocrine Pulse combo didn't exist and this didn't cost a precious shot of your low speed to use, this would be a decent Fortune recarge schtick. Keep it in mind if the core Mutant Combo gets nerfed at your table.

Recuperate - Spend one shot and X Manxome to heal 5x. While it's not as sexy as the engine combo above, this is the fastest healing in the game, bar none. Even without a recharge engine, that's up to 45 additional wound points per session your Gene Freak can take - and another 15 per fight if you start abusing the Partial Recovery option

Slow Burn - A free fortune die on one check per sequence is chump change for, but you still consider this if you're already going the reroll build route.

Teleread - You know, I woulda thought the nerd overlap between RPGers and CompSci / InfoSci majors would have killed this sort of sloppiness off by now.

Here's the schtick:

Spend 1 Genome point to know the definitive answer to a single question of 25 words or less, if that answer can be found written down anywhere in your current juncture.

And here's the sort of question to ask your MC with it in order to outright break the game:

Is there a driving route shorter than 100,000 miles which passes through all towns of population above 50,000 in the US of A ?

That's a 23 word yes/no question which has an answer derivable from publicly available information. And if your MC can solve it within the game session when you spend another and another Manxome and swap the distance, population threshold and geographic regions around you've just won a million dollars real money for your game group.

Very Fast - For 1 Manxome, you reduce the shot cost of all future actions this sequence by 1 with a minimum cost of 1. This is merely okay and not as strong as you might think. Remember that your base Speed is only 6, so with standard attacks taking three shots and no Mutant powers costing 2 shots, this gets to be useless one-sixth of the time. Since when you roll a 1 on your Initiative die, this costs you a point to act three times on shots 6,4 and 2 instead of acting three times on shots 7,4 and 1. And even at the best case, it's just one extra attack as your 12,9,6,3 shots become 11,8,6,4,2 shots.

Very Strong - For 1 Shot you get to be as strong as the Big Bruiser until end of fight. Well, kindof, the wording isn't standardized or anything, but that's a pretty decent offense, since you get to make hand to hand attacks with your Mutant Value and clobber people with your damage 13 Parking Meter.

Unfortunately you cannot ever take Signature Weapon on it, so a dedicated Parking Meter Master is going to upgrade:

funny how the art for this book is already obsolete upon publication