Amethyst Evolution - Out Now! PDF on RPGNow in Radiohead Fashion!!

How did I miss this?!  Well, real life sometimes gets in the way of the hobby and the blog.  But, now that I have caught it, it needs to be said here.  Amethyst Evolution, the second book in the Amethyst universe, has now come out!!

You may have caught a little bit of my preview article for Amethyst Evolution a little bit ago.  You will recall I was really, really excited to see that there were going to be some awesome new organizations coming around as well as some new Techan classes and a few new races.  Things are just getting better and better.  Dias Ex Machina is going to be striking again with this awesome book.

As for a little blurb of what you'll find in this book, here's a snippet from the Dias Ex Machina site which explains what you'll find in Amethyst Evolution:

Lifepaths: New lifepaths are being introduced including options for divine and evil characters.
Races: Kodiak, pagus, and tenenbri are introduced as playable races. In addition, all the old races of Foundations are reprinted and revised to match up with the developing 4 th Edition philosophy.
Classes: Get up close and personal with a new techan class, the vanguard. Older techan classes are expanded and revised with alternate class features and powers. Also included are revised Foundations classes presented with simplified abilities and fixed level features instead of encounter and/or daily powers. These classes may replace original Foundations classes in your current game if it permits these alternative classes. These do not replace the classes from Foundations ; both versions are compatible with each other and players can elect either option in a game without upsetting game balance.
Paragon Paths: New paths are available for new races as well as options for classic races and classes.
Feats: Dozens of new feats are offered, including martial arts and explosive feats.
Epic Destinies: New epic paths are now available for both echan and techan characters.
Equipment: Nuclear weapons (yes nuclear weapons) are available. Look for larger power armor and aircraft. Players can now (clumsily) wield super heavy weapons.

Sounds pretty awesome right?!  Nuclear Weapons!!!  Awesome.  That sounds sufficiently EPIC to me.  You can get the book off of RPGNow right now! and guess what?!  In very Radiohead Fashion, the publishers have decided to let you choose how much you want to pay for the book!!!!  There are two price points available for Amethyst Evolution; you can pick it up for $14.99 or $9.99 whichever you feel is the fair price to pay.  They would love to have the support I am sure, so consider popping for the extra $5 when you buy the book.  Also, the print edition of the book will be available soon.  I love my hardcover print copy.  You might want to also consider their PDF/Print bundle which is also available now.  This pack ensures that you'll be getting the print version when it comes out.  Very cool.

Amethyst Evolutions - My first look at something awesome

Chris Dias, of Dias Ex Machina, was nice enough to send me an advanced copy of one of the chapters from the upcoming Amethyst Evolutions.  I can't exactly show off the chapter itself, but he did give me permission to talk about it.  I have not yet had time enough to print the chapter out, lay on the floor, and then play in all the pages, but that is pretty much the extent of how amazing the chapter was.  Chapter 2 of the book brings several new interpretations of the older races, some new races (including the Kodiaks, which I showed off in one of my earlier sneak peak photos from the book) as well as the thing that I wanted the most... ORGANIZATIONS.  I thought the organizations in the first book were awesome, but I wanted more.  These are awesome as well, and I STILL WANT MORE!!!  I think I might have to beg Chris to do a book full of just organizations at some point.  It's like giving your adventuring group a nice big club to be a part of.  If you hadn't seen the cover to the book yet, it has been up on the Dias Ex Machina site since the end of March, but I haven't had a chance to throw it up here on the site yet.  He said they are getting pretty close to completing it, so I am very much looking forward to reviewing it and bringing you all of the juicy Amethyst details when they finally come out.

More Amethyst Love to Come

Chris Dias over at Dias Ex Machina has asked if the Dump Stat would liked to be involved in a sort of preview/play-test/review of some new upcoming Amethyst related goodness to come.  And, of course we said that we would.  I have really been enjoying getting into this setting for D&D 4e and I am drooling in anticipation waiting for more Amethyst like the dog in this here video below -



But, I don't have to wait any longer.  We have gotten the preview/play-test materials and they are pretty cool.  This preview pack includes several new builds for each of the classes included in Amethyst Foundations.  Can you say awesome??  It is about 40 pages of "Essentials" goodness *wink wink* get the pun.  So, coming soon, we will be taking a pretty detailed, but at the sime time every secretive look at

Amethyst Essentials

New Amethyst Art Teasers

Chris Dias, from Dias Ex Machina, was kind enough to send over some artwork from the upcoming new book in the Amethyst Series: Amethyst Evolutions.  Take a look at these hi-res images below.  They rock.  I can't decide which one I like better...

 

Pretty awesome stuff if you ask me.  This is a testament to the quality of these books.  I loved the first book, Amethyst: Foundations, and I am really looking forward to seeing and reviewing Evolutions.  Stay tuned here for more Amethyst related news and reviews as it comes out.  Until next time. 

Q&A with Chris Dias - Amethyst, NeuroSpasta, New Content Revealed!!

I have the privalege of bringing to you today a Q&A with Chris Dias, creator of Amethyst as well as the upcoming new 4e Cyberpunk game NeuroSpasta. You won't find these questions answered anywhere else (I don't think). Awesome stuff gets spilled here first. Give it a read and find out more...

*****

Q.1 – For us here at the Dump Stat, the character is the first thing that we think about when looking at a new game or system, so, I’d like to start things off by asking you to tell us about any memorable characters that you have run personally, or that you have had in your test games over the years. Did any in particular stand out?

It's hard for me to quantify what makes a memorable character. Well developed, creative back-story, or is the character simply insane? I have players with great concepts with no capacity to properly play the roles and players without an original idea in their head but intelligent enough to act appropriately in a presented crisis. When I begin my large campaigns, I oversee the character creation process, but when doing a playtest session, everything goes…and by saying that, it’s like throwing butane on a lit match. My players seldom reminisce about their well developed characters, often joking about their one-session lunatics. Just take these character names as examples:

Sergeant Ruttagard Howard, Wee-Man for Hire
Hugh Mann the Third
Axebeard Beardaxe
Beardaxe Axebeard (dwarvish brothers with different mothers)
Lamb Shanks
Choad Moedin
Enoch Chauk (it may take a while for people to figure that one out)

Q.2 – Amethyst is a campaign setting set in a possible alternate future for our earth. Why did you decide to build the game world around our home planet, rather than around some other non-earth world?

Because Amethyst didn't emerge fully formed but evolved slowly over twenty years. It began because a friend was convincing me to do a D&D game, which I was not inclined to do at the time. So instead of developing an idea from scratch, I dusted off a setting that I had put to pasture eight years prior. At the time, it was just a post-apocalyptical story, with no magic, set on Earth after dragons had reawakened. I had shelved it because the film Reign of Fire came out after which covered similar ground. So I just shoehorned D&D into that idea and Amethyst extruded out the other side. If I was asked to create a setting from the ground up, things could have been different. But as a consequence of setting it on Earth, it forced me to establish ground rules which I have been following ever since. If I hadn't been lazy back in 2001, it would have been a very different game now, and definitely wouldn’t have been called Amethyst.

Q.3 – You have mentioned that one of the primary foci of Amethyst in terms of theme is the disrupting element that Magic has on technology. This comes out very strongly in the rules as well. Conversely speaking though, we were interested to hear about what you thought about the disruption on Magic by technology? Did this ever come out in Amethyst or any of the other work that we have yet to see?

Disruption came about because the setting made no sense without it. In a fictional fantasy world, you're tolerated more suspension of disbelief. You can have a nation like Gondor from Lord of the Rings exist for three thousand years without anyone inventing a flush toilet. It was gameplay that actually did it for us. Who needs the education to be a wizard when you can have…a gun? My players took advantage of it and the setting started to unravel as they--okay, one player—began wielding lasers brazenly along with his sword. Disruption was ret-conned six months into the setting. Now it’s a vital component and one of its selling points. The moment we allow technology to disrupt magic, magic loses that edge and again the setting begins to fray. At the present point in the setting, technology has not figured a way to combat disruption. Currently, the only solution is to eliminate magic from an area (by destroying or pushing away the things and people that radiate).

As for these concepts outside of Amethyst, there are actually quite a few, just not as obvious. Lord of the Rings, Princess Mononoke, and even Dune deal with fantasy worlds that become overwhelmed by industry. It may not be a primary element of the setting, and often times it's subtle and metaphorical. In the case of the PC game Arcanum, it deals with technology overwhelming a fantasy world, effectively the reflection of Amethyst. So I felt the idea of a magical world being overwhelmed by technology was old hat. But a place where magic was emerging and reducing technology felt fresher…unless you watched Visionaries…no? Anybody? Seriously, why has no one ever brought that up?

Q. 4 – Amethyst provides us, the gamer, with a whole lot of new crunchy mechanical goodness to go along with the setting. Did you deal with balance issues in creating this material, and if you did, how did you go about actually getting those issues into balance?

Originally, one of our developers really pushed the idea that we make firearms more powerful and use disruption as a balancing effect to keep them in check. We eventually decided that wasn't good. I believe our weapons are extremely well balanced and I've yet to receive a word of objection about advanced armor. In contrast, balancing our classes has been a difficult process. For one, WOTC shifted the power balance with later their books. My co-writers and I had this idea in our heads that we should break from the notion of defined class roles, replacing it with the concept of a homogenized group of cooperating players that filled the roles defined by D&D as a single team rather than separate entities. That didn't go over too well and there were comments that techans were underpowered and undefined. Only when you have a proper mix of techan characters did their strengths appear. We're addressing people's concerns with the second book, allowing players to properly define their characters into a single role. This will help with fantasy/techan mixed groups as well.

Q.5 – During your appearance on the Tome Show, you mention that you thought there would be two kinds of people that would want to pick up Amethyst, one of those types being gamers who want to plunder Amethyst for its tech goodness. Have you had any experience, personally, with using elements from Amethyst Foundations or one of the other books (which have yet to come out) in running a game that was not set in the Amethyst world?

I tried but my players didn't want to. Many of them have been with Amethyst since 2002 and don't want to try something new. I worked on a cyberpunk game but that ended up as its own construct away from Amethyst called NeuroSpasta, though still using the same base rules. However, I've seen other people create ideas using Amethyst's system. You wrote an article yourself recently about how Amethyst can be tuned to fit another setting. I was following two online projects attempting to adapt Amethyst to Starcraft II, which I thought was brilliant. I am still hoping someone creates an Alien/s plug-in for Amethyst—considered my favorite science fiction setting of all and one I have personally role-played in (just check my first website, www.serenadawn.com).

Q.6 - You present a very interesting set of vehicle rules in Amethyst Foundations. Do you have any interesting memories of players using vehicles in the world that you would like to share with us?

The best example was a few months ago in our Amethyst game. Several fantasy/ techan players teamed up with a group of techan NPCs to escape from this keep controlled by an army of skeggs and boggs (goblins in Amethyst). The techan NPCs had a vehicle the group could use to escape. The fantasy characters had to ride atop this giant ETV Scrambler (think a Winnebago crossed with a tank) as it rocketed from this goblin controlled castle, monsters in quick pursuit. So there were a thousand skeggs running down after them armed with rudimentary blades and bows. Behind them were an immeasurable number of puggs (tiny goblins). In front were these vehicles, controlled by a skegg with protective goggles, holding onto a navel helm like a bus driver. There was a huge lever to his side he used to shift gears. Behind him were two massive oggraks (ogres) with blindfolds standing on either side of a pump-trolley, pushing the lever up and down to provide the vehicle's acceleration. On either side of the vehicle was a wound-up catapult that spun completely around to launch projectiles. The projectiles were puggs with sharpened helmets. The players have to fight off these launching goblins while also fending off opposing vehicles as they closed in. There are fights between vehicles. The scrambler races through a forest and over a narrow bridge. The goblin trucks are running into each other, into trees, or flying off a cliff. Take the climactic chases from the last two Mad Max films and throw in a dash of the jeep chase from the last Indiana Jones film, and you'll have some idea of the chaos that was this encounter. It took a good hour to play out, but the players quite enjoyed it.

Q.7 – What has been your experience running Amethyst at high levels? What were the kind of challenges the players encountered?

Don't know. My personal gaming experiences have been limited to under 20th level. The first Amethyst campaign was 3.0/3.5. The second shifted to 4ED but the characters finished the campaign by 18th level. The game we're in currently should move into epic at some point. We have had test reports from people playing that high but we limited the monsters in the first book to mostly the first two tiers. We also don't have epic destinies showing up until Evolution, so everyone has had to wait to run through the final ten levels in canon Amethyst.

Q.8 – We have heard that there will be several new books coming down the road, which will both add new elements to the game. Included in Amethyst Evolutions will be Epic Destinies as well as a new Techan class, the Vanguard. Would you mind filling us in on any of the other new elements that you will be including in this next book? Organizations come to mind…

Yes, just for you, we added new organizations, both for techans and fantasy characters (offer you a free one below). We have new lifepaths and paragon paths. We have a new weapon property, nuclear, as well as a whole slew super heavy weapons. To complete the package, we are also introducing larger advanced armor…okay mecha, we'll just say it. And then of course, there are the "alternate" builds. Tracking the philosophy of WOTC and their new Essentials line, every class and path from Foundations has been re-offered adhering to the Essentials philosophy. So the book covers both rule sets. Thankfully, these alternate builds don't take up a lot of space.

ORGANIZATIONS
LOGOS LANCE
It is not uncommon to see Limshau custodians operating outside of city walls. Once a member switches from the city-white kawabari to black kawabari armor, he or she is immediately sent out to either retrieve a previously lost tome of knowledge or document an important event. Although occasionally travelling alone, most often the custodian joins up with a group of travelers with similar goals. Certain circumstances have occurred where an entire party of Limshau citizens are gathered together to venture into the open world. Not all have to be custodians, though one of them usually is (or perhaps a librarian). When this occurs, the logos lance (as they are called) is tasked for a specific mission. It is often difficult, involving a journey encompassing months or even years. This lance is commissioned by a higher authority, up to and sometimes including the king himself.


Benefit: If players are forming a logos lance, one member must have a lifepath connected to the kingdom. All players of the lance receive one free knowledge skill of their choice to be a trained skill OR receive a +2 bonus to one trained knowledge skill of their choice. The entire party is supplied riding horses for free and receive a 20% discount to all gear at 1st level from Limshau.

Q.9 – How has your mindset had to shift from Amethyst, a game setting that you have worked on for years, to your new, upcoming game, NeuroSpasta?

I have to work on one for several weeks, then stop and resume the other. I can't just flip back and forth. They have very different approaches with both fluff and crunch. I had worked on NeuroSpasta for months last year until shifting back to Amethyst, which I have been working on since August. After Evolution and Factions comes out, I can finally return to NeuroSpasta and dot the last "I". As Amethyst becomes more in line with evolving D&D philosophy, NeuroSpasta has drifted further away, though not actually moving in the process. Where D&D has endeavored to simplify itself, NeuroSpasta (and its parent system, Ultramodern4) has maintained its intention to create a universal system where you can fashion dozens of different classes from a pairing system of ladders and classes. As a consequence, character growth and creation does involve more work.

And although NeuroSpasta is being developed after, it tracks its origin to well before, when it was a cyberpunk/mecha homebrew game called Necropolis. I took that old game, blended it with spices from Shirow's Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell, and wrapped it around a setting which I believe to be unique in its own way.

Q.10 – We have only really seen teasers for this upcoming new release, is there anything specific that you would be willing to leak about the new setting NeuroSpasta or about Ultramodern4?

Let's see…
…You can buy, build, modify and control robots on the battlefield. They are effectively player controlled monsters except that they gain your half-level bonus, so they never go obsolete. We got models that resemble hat boxes on wheels to small tanks.

…Our hacker class (called a manipulator) can not only hack security cameras and networks, but also opponents on the battlefield. He can create programs that bundle multiple attack powers together.

…Oh yeah, and we have over 180 cybernetic devices, from skill implants to total body prosthesis.

*****

Well, that is all for this time around, hopefully, when the new books come out, we will be able to have some more questions answered as well. I have to thank Mr. Dias for taking time out of his schedule to answer our questions. If you haven't checked Amethyst out yet, go do it, it is awesome. You won't regret it.

You can find the products mentioned here by visiting Dias Ex Machina.

Applications of Amethyst - Using the Rules for Something...else...

After finishing my review of Amethyst: Foundations last week, it has been really fresh in my head. So, I have been looking around to find all the different ways that I could use this book in different ways. Here are a couple of the different things that I have come up with so far.

Unreal Tournament

Last week, Cradle of Rabies, did a post about playing Unreal Tournament using D&D rules (http://cradleofrabies.blogspot.com/2011/01/unreal-tournament-in-d.html). What a brilliant idea. I played a little bit of Unreal back in high school, though I haven’t touched it in a long time. I must say, using Amethyst to run a game of Unreal would be a really, really easy thing to do. Because Amethyst brings a significant amount of technology to the classic rules of 4e D&D that we know and love, you can easily combine these both to run a game of Unreal pretty easily. Running the game, using Amethyst, is simply a matter of setting up a very complicated style of gladiator match and letting players rumble. Amethyst has all the rules you need for guns, tech armor, tech classes, etc. What would be even cooler is putting classic fantasy classes into the gladiator match and watching them take on the techan classes of Amethyst. Sounds like fun to me.

Cowboys vs. Aliens

I wish I had noticed the Appendix at the end of Amethyst before. In a recent post on this blog, I talked about the upcoming film, Cowboys vs. Aliens, and the graphic novel which it is based on. You could pretty easily run a game of Cowboys vs. Aliens using Amethyst and 4e D&D in conjunction. The 4e Monster manual has all sorts of Aberrant terrors to represent aliens and Amethyst provides all the alien technology, and even low level technology, that you could need. Check out the book and give their appendix a good read over and you will have lots more ideas for running a game.

Ergo Proxy

This one might not be as well known to people on the network, but Ergo Proxy is an anime produced by Geneon (you can check out their official site here, though it is all in Japanese: http://www.ergoproxy.com/ look it up on Wikipedia if you want to know more). Ergo Proxy is one of my favorite anime and presents a fantastic apocalyptic world. I also found It to be a matter of fate that the final episode of the series was entitled Deus Ex Machina (the name which is parodied by the company that produced Amethyst). Running a game of Ergo Proxy, using the Amethyst rules, would just be a matter of re-skinning the fluffy elements of Amethyst and using all the crunch. Actually, the story of Ergo Proxy follows very similar threads to the fantasy of Amethyst, especially with the super advanced Bastion cities where technology and techan humans abound. Check out the series and then consider using Amethyst to run a game in that world.

D&D / Warhammer 40k Crossovers

Given the popularity of these two games, I can’t imagine that I am the only one that thought about running a game of D&D which crosses over with the 40 K universe. Using the technology presented in Amethyst could be a great way to simulate Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Space Orcs, etc. I have always been fascinated with what would happen if Mankind from the 41st millennia happened to invade the Forgotten Realms, or maybe even Dark Sun. Because a lot of the higher level gear in Amethyst represents highly advanced technology, you could easily put those weapons in the hands of one of the Techan classes, and, with a little homebrew and reskinning, you have yourselves a little Deathwatch company of your own. Aren’t you curious? Amethyst gives you the tools that you need to make this happen. I would love to see this kind of game play out in paper and dice. Wouldn’t you? Elminster vs. Rogal Dorn? Come on. You have to admit it, that would be awesome.

Sure, maybe you want to use the Amethyst rules just for what they are, a campaign setting all on their own, but why stop there really? There are a plethora of other applications for the book, making it a must have in my opinion. I am sure that by the time I have posted this I will have thought up a whole bunch more.

Amethyst Foundations - Full Review

Over the past few weeks, and before my brief trip to Canada, I have been discussing at length on this blog the Campaign Setting, Amethyst: Foundations, a 3^rd party tome for 4e D&D. I have highlighted some of the key aspects of this game and also talked about some of the things that I would like to see more of. But, now, that I have had a chance to really look into this product a lot deeper, I would like to give it a full review. Some of this might be a bit repetitive, but for the sake of completeness, I want to outline the book, the things I like, and dislike, in full here.

Amethyst is a game that takes what we have always come to accept about the Fantastic world of D&D and blends it with a futuristic, post-apocolyptic version of the earth we know so well. The lore of the world, is both complex and fascinating, deftlymixing two worlds, the magical world of the Echan, what we see in classic fantasy, with the technological world of the Techan humans. However, the game is not about these two worlds living peacefully in perfect harmony, but rather about the disruption that magic has on the technological world and vice versa.

But, enough with the summary, I want to get into what I liked and disliked about this setting, and the book itself. This setting is published by Goodman games and is a glorious hard cover volume that fits perfectly on my shelf beside all of my other 4e books. The Cover art is wondrous, as you can see above and below, but the back cover is just as appealing. The book is about 300 B&W pages, and contains a Character sheet and a full map of the North America region in the back of the book.

The book’s art is of incredibly good quality and takes a much more realistic tone than that of what we usually see in products put out by Wizards of the Coast. I found that the images in the book really help to add to the tone of the setting; rather than playing in a Fantasy world, we are playing in a different version of ours, so having more realistic imagery makes a big difference. My only complaint is that I would have liked to see more of them. There were some sections of the book that I went many pages without having anything to break up the text. For example, the powers section in each class entry had very little artwork to break up what I would consider to be a very mechanics heavy part of the book. I would have liked a couple of images in that section to help illustrate some of the powers, or even just to provide something pretty to look at. The full page image on page 4 and all of the chapter heading art is just amazing. When you compare that with the lack of artwork in some of the sections, the book has a bit of a balance issue.

Moving on to editing, I didn’t find all that many mistakes as I was going through the book. I think that is always a good sign. A lot publishers struggle with this, but the editor behind this book, Elizabeth Bauman, did a great job. If she really did the whole thing on her own, that is a really big accomplishment.

The writing in this book is excellent and absorbing. I found myself getting sucked into the book pretty easily. I have very few negative things to say about the writing here. Chris Dias and his team of writers did a great job.

Let’s take a look at these sections one by one.

Chapter 1: The Choice

This section provides an introduction to the world and outlines what the world is really about. I found the writing here to be some of the best in the book. It clearly states exactly the kind of game you are going to be getting into when you play a game of Amethyst. Also, the Glossary section in Chapter 1 proved very useful in providing a quick place to look up important terms that are presented later in the chapters detailing the world of Amethyst.

Chapter 2: Races in Amethyst

This section made it very clear to me, when reading, that we were not going to be dealing with classic fantasy when it comes to Amethyst. One of the decisions that the designers made when writing this campaign setting was that they were not going to be using any of the traditional races that are presented in WotC material; you won’t be seeing any Dragonborn here. In my opinion, this section was a big plus. It takes a lot of work to imagine an entire world and the designers could have taken the easy way out and used the races that already exist in 4e, but instead, they developed their own races, each of which has its own unique area of focus. I liked the fact, although the races may be familiar, they are still different and separate from what we have seen so far. Rather than use the existing 4e races in conjunction with Amethyst, I have been thinking more along the lines of how I could use the races in Amethyst in my more traditional fantasy style setting. The one critique that I had of this setting was that some of the images didn’t fit the image of in my head for the race presented.

The Organizations section in this chapter, though very short, was excellent and I wanted more. I did a full post on my blog already about this section, but I really, really liked the idea of giving the player group a thematic and mechanical boost for tying their origins together. I know how many times I have had problems with players taking drastically different backgrounds, but this mechanic gives them a reason to all know each other from the beginning.

Chapter 3: Lifepath

Amethyst did something similar to Dark Sun did; they present an additional template, which you can add to your character, during creation, that gives some mechanical benefits, but also add a lot of flavor to the character. I liked these life paths a lot. Though many of them were very setting specific, I found that I could probably use a few of them as stand-alone templates in a game based in a different world.

Chapter 4: Classes

Amethyst presents several new classes for Techan characters, those that wield technology rather than magic. These classes, again, take what we know about the mechanics of 4e and twist them into something different. I really liked the multiple roles element of these classes; rather than simply assigning a single combat role, and pigeon holing a character into one specific combat style, they give them multiple roles, which to me, is how 4e should have been from the start. Good stuff here. I could see myself playing any one of these classes when I get a round of Amethyst with my players.

Chapter 5: Paragon Paths

I found this section lacking. With 4 new classes and a huge world to game in, I expected to see more Paragon Paths than that which was presented here. All of them seemed pretty solid; they gave some good Echan paths, as well as some good Techan paths too, but I wanted more of them, which, as I understand it, will be coming in the second book that is in the works now.

Chapter 6: Skills and Feats

This section presents a host of new options for Characters in Amethyst. 4 new Skills are outlined – Demolitions, Engineer, Sciences, Vehicle Operations and a new use of the Athletics skill, which seemed to be a bit out of place. The Feats in this section were great, especially all of the ones which are keyed off of the Lifepaths presented in Chapter 3.

Chapter 7: Equipment

Of all the things that attracted me to Amethyst, technology had to be number one. Being able to run a D&D game with high-tech guns has always been something that I wanted to do. So, when I heard about Amethyst, I knew I needed to do a review of this game. The equipment section in this book is everything that I hoped it would be. You get a grand host of new toys to play with, including a range of firearms which not only covers simple, traditional guns, but also includes Vapor Rifles, Pulse weapons, Rail Guns, and all kinds of other goodies from grenades to Gaus repeaters. I could not have asked for more. The way that weapons are broken up and divided by level is also extremely well done. I loved it. Not only equipment, but vehicles are also presented here, lots of them, and they are awesome. The crunch on all of it seems very well balanced, though I admit that I haven’t had a chance to playtest it yet, but from my number crunching, it seems perfectly within the already established ranges for damage and proficiency.

Oh. Did I forget to mention power armor. They did exactly what I would have done. Things like mechanical armor, take up multiple equipment slots and cost more based on the number of effects that they tie into one piece of gear. Great stuff.

Chapter 8: Expanding Your Character

This section fell flat to me. I felt like it could have easily been rolled into other sections of the book. Although the presentation of new rituals is great and dandy, I think organizationally, that this section could have been totally broken up separated. Though the section was very short, it does present some valuable information to support the setting.

Chapter 9: the World that changed and Chapter 10: The Look of the World

These two chapters cover all that you need to know about the world of Amethyst and there is a lot of world to learn about. I particularly liked the descriptions of all of the Bastions that are described here. I don’t want to get into summary here, but I will say that these sections give you everything you need to know in order to run a great sandbox game. I wanted NPC’s though. There were not a lot of big names provided to match all of the big story presented here. It would have been nice to have some figures, names, etc. to go with the giant world that is Amethyst.

Chapter 11: Monster

The problem that I had here is that with rejecting a lot of the traditional races and monsters in 4e, Amethyst rejects a lot of the current beasties available; this section was just not long enough. The choices in creatures in Amethyst are very limited, which means that you are going to have to go into the other 4e books to find creatures to put up against the players, if you intend to have creatures in combat, without getting too repetitive. I had no problems with the creatures that were in the book. Cancer Dragons?! Awesome. But, I wanted more in this case as well.

Chapter 12: Adventures

The adventure ideas here were great. This wasn’t a long section, but it was a good one. However, my caveat to this is a matter of priority. I think a few hooks in this section would have been enough for me. I don’t think this section needed to be quite this long and with areas, like that on Monsters, and the section on Organizations being pretty small, I think emphasis could have been put on those areas and this section could have been skipped. It wasn’t bad, I just think that it could have been better suited elsewhere.

Wrapping things up, I think Amethyst is a really great product. I would buy this book just for all the rules on guns and equipment. The book is priced right alongside all the other products for 4e that are out there and this book is a lot more content heavy than most. But, the book does have a few issues that range between being minor and major. Several sections seemed to be a bit long and specific, while others seemed to be a bit short. I would have loved to see more monsters in this book and maybe a little bit less about Adventures, but these minor complaints are exactly that, minor, I would give this book a 5 out of 5. I look forward to the next one, which will I think will solve a lot of the issues that I found with this book... i.e. wanting more and more of it.

Review: Amethyst Foundations Pt. 3 - Organizations

One of the things that really caught my eye in the Amethyst: Foundations book was the Organizations listing on the Table of Contents, because it wasn't where I thought Organizations would be (which is usually somewhere in the world fluff section). Rather, the Organizations section comes in the middle of the Races of Amethyst Chapter (Chapter 2 if you were wondering). I don't really know why it would go in this section, since it seems like it would fit better in the next one (which covers the special backgrounds that Amethyst utilizes called Lifepaths), but this is a very small complaint. Actually, I only bring this criticism up because I am about to Praise the Living Daylights out of this section and I didn't want it to sound like I was being a Fanboy (This is a review after all).

The Organizations section, although only a little over a page long, is one of my favorite pages in the entire book, because not only does it solve one of the biggest problems that I have with gaming, but it also gives the players an incentive to actually come up with a shared background.

Essentially, the Organizations that Amethyst presents are very cool little groups, which may come from a certain area of the world, or be dedicated to a certain task. You only get the benefits from the Organization if all of the players in the group agree to take that Organization as part of their background. But, if all the players consent, and they make characters that are members of that Organization, they get some in-game benefits. These benefits may come in the form of a Feat, some gear, of even a new, shiny vehicle to drive around the world in.

This is just a purely brilliant idea. Why didn't WotC think of this first?

The idea of having the player's be part of an Organization is not really knew, I guess, but having it in the character generation section, and clearly stating exactly what the benefit they will gain by taking that Organization as part of their character, is pretty ingenious. Also, by putting it into the Races section of the book, they are really implying that the Organization to which you belong is just as much a part of you as your race is (I guess there was a reason why they put that in the Races section after all...). These Organizations, in my mind, offer a plethora of adventure hooks, story ideas, and also give the GM a method to send the players off on some mandated quest; I can easily see using membership in said Organization as a legitimate reason for sending the players off on a published adventure when I, as GM, start looking for something a bit more structured to do. Since they are members of the group, orders coming down from the Top are probably not uncommon; though it may seem like railroading, it comes off as a little bit less tyrannical when there is some justifiable built in system within the world that I can point to for legitimacy.

I will say that I would like to have seen more about each of the Organizations presented; honestly, I would like to have seen a LOT MORE Organizations presented as well (especially ones for Echans as well as Techans). But, what I will say is that I will definitely be working on something like this for my homebrew games in other settings.

Review: Amethyst: Foundations Pt. 2

My continuing look at Amethyst: Foundations continues today as I take a look at the player character races that you have access to.

One of the things that I thought was very interesting is the road that Amethyst chose to take when it comes to player character races. Although the majority of content available in classic D&D 4e is available for use and functions perfectly with Amethyst, all of the races that are presented in the core rulebooks are outlawed (except for the humans). I was at first a little skeptical about this choice. For me, the player character races presented in the core books have a lot of background to them and players tend to have a strong preferences when it comes to these races. However, I really think that Amethyst does it well.

Amethyst presents rules for 7 new player character races as well as the rules for creating half-breeds between the Fae Races and the Evolved Races. The races in Amethyst all fall into these two categories. You can equate the Fae races with a lot of the classic D&D races such as elves, Halflings, and Dwarfs. Although a lot of the imagery in Amethyst is a bit more realistic, you can still pretty clearly see the fantasy equivalent in the pictures that accompany the racial descriptions and stat blocks.

All of the races presented here come with a hefty amount of description and background. The amount of detail that is provided to the player really helps to make up for the fact that you have to learn new races in order to play this game.

I have always enjoyed playing dwarfs and Halflings, so looking at the characters here, I really liked the descriptions of the Gimfen and the Narros. I will probably be rolling up a few characters in the next couple of weeks and I can guarantee that a few of these characters will be Gimfen. Because the Gimfen race really mixes well with the high technology in the world, rolling up a few of those little guys sounds like a lot of fun.

Stay tuned for more in my continuing series of reviews of Amethyst. Next time I will be tackling the Organizations section and explain why I think that Wizard's should have thought this up first.

Review: Amethyst by Dias Ex Machina and Goodman Games Pt. 1

This will be the first part in a long series of reviews that I will be doing about the game Amethyst Foundations, published by Dias Ex Machina and Goodman Games. Before I finally was able to get a chance to look at the book myself, I had read a few things about it at other sites around the web.

Amethyst is essentially a new, high-tech campaign setting which uses the 4th Edition D&D rules set. That is a very simple generalization because, from what I have seen, the game is a whole lot more.

It is set in the near future, where the world of fantasy has merged with our earth. I don't want to give too much away just yet. I haven't made it very far through this book, because, in all honesty, it has me totally absorbed. It is going to take quite a while to read from cover to cover considering that it is almost 300 pages in length and I have a kid that I have to play with on a regular basis. I keep getting stalled at all the artwork which is incredibly well done.

From what I have seen so far, there is nothing but good things going on here. I have barely even made it into the races section of the book and I can already see myself running an ongoing campaign in this world.

Look for more in my review series of Amethyst coming soon. I will be dong a more complete, full review of the product, as well as posting characters, and my own personal adventure ideas for use with the campaign setting. With any luck, I may even have an interview from the writer to share with you as well.