We've played a few sessions of Contagion 2nd Ed now, and we're very much enjoying it. The setting is rich and fun, and character creation is hugely diverse and dynamic. The rules are built on a fairly standard D20 system, so they don't feel unfamiliar, but it's not just a repackaged version of another game and stand quite well on their own. Game play seems to be as balanced as the DM wants it to be, and there's a lot of opportunity to be both player friendly and Lovecraftian as the tone of the story requires. The book itself in frequently injected with bits of lore and short story which are enjoyable. They sometimes get a bit distracting while going through race and calling descriptions, but ultimately I feel like its more helpful to have more than less.
That all sounds pretty good, so why 4 stars instead of 5? My players and I all found the organization within the book to be confusing. It's not uncommon to be attempting to read the rules for something only to be directed to another chapter which may or may not answer your question before directing you back to the chapter you were on to start with. Character Creation especially was difficult to follow at first because the character creation chapter gives brief descriptions of races and callings and the cost to choose them, but you have to go to a different chapter to get the full mechanical information for them. We would sooner have seen the brief descriptions removed or placed in the races and callings chapters. In a physical book I don't think this would be too frustrating to flip back and forth from page to page, but in a PDF it's taking me some time to get the right bookmarks and annotations in place to allow me to follow what I need to follow to make everything work out. This is exacerbated by the table of contents which is designed for the print version of the book. The PDF version is off by about 12 - 15 pages because of the introductory material.
The bottom line is that we really enjoy this game and are very much looking forward to continuing our story. If you do not like games with a fair amount of crunch, you might want to steer clear on this one, and if you're not willing to put the time into jumping around between chapters while you try to puzzle everything out, skip it. If you are willing to put the effort in then you'll find Contagion 2nd Edition to be more than worth the effort.
tl;dr: The setting is excellent and the rules are good, but the book itself could use better organization. We like it.
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |