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I was a little disappointed in the cards, but maybe that's a matter of mismatched expectations. I was hoping it would be a rich set of situation aspects usable in a variety of settings. Instead, it seems more like a sampler pack - possibly useful as inspiration for creating your own.
There are 10 cards for environmental conditions. Most of them cover a scattered handful of specific weather conditions. I'd have used one card for weather, say, "Severe Weather," letting you adapt it to your setting. The other environmental cards offer a small sampling of environmental conditions. Again, they were a little over-specific. For example, instead of having two cards for different ways to have poor visibility, I'd have gone with "Poor Visibility" as one card, leaving you to adapt it for your setting. Your campaign probably has a lot of variety in your locations, but the environmental condition cards would be applicable to only a small subset of them. A better mix, if I had to squeeze a broadl...
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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*Winterhorn* is an incredible game that does for LARPs what* Papers Please *did for videogames, making the banality of evil in authoritarian regimes real.
You are an interagency working group in an unnamed country loosely based on East Germany (but even western democracies have secret police, the FBI ran COINTELPRO for decades, and in 2003 a British undercover agent had a child with an activist before disappearing.) Your target is Winterhorn, an activist group composed of seven core members with ideals, desires, and weaknesses laid out in the briefing material. Additionally, you have a role as a secret police agent, with a past and an agenda of your own.
Over three rounds of thirty minutes each, your secret police squad will select seven options from deck of twelve secret police tactics, ranging in violence from hands-off wiretapping to sending 'patriotic' thugs (off-duty cops) to assault members of Winterhorn. You can also be tricky, setting up front groups to siphon away recrui...
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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I like the concept but I find many of the consequences too severe and somewhat uneven.
Consider mild consequences. In Fate Accelerated, which is what I use, "mild consequences vanish at the end of the scene, provided you get a chance to rest" (page 22). In Fate Core, "Mild consequences don’t require immediate medical attention. They hurt, and they may present an inconvenience, but they aren’t going to force you into a lot of bed rest" (page 163). I recall someone's rule of thumb that mild consequences need first aid or a brief rest, moderate consequences need a doctor, and severe consequences need an emergency room; I'm not sure that's official, but it seems compatible with the Fate Accelerated and Fate Core descriptions.
And yet this deck includes "mild" consequences such as *Lost Some Fingers*, *Cooked Off Ear*, and *Fractured Thigh*. A brief rest or a little first aid isn't going to grow back your fingers, you know?
And then among the severe consequences, we find *[1-5] Fin...
Rating: [3 of 5 Stars!] |
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