From: PRUSAT@pfizer.com To: KSJIM@NMT.EDU Subject: WEB Page Date: 26 Jan 2000 17:35:18 -0500 X-Status: K.J. First of all, I want to complement you on your web site. Most Excellent. I am glad to hear you are re-writing the TORG 2000 rule book, given some of the things I have seen out there already. I am assuming we can take some of these things as (semi) official, like the new world laws for CE, and the martial arts writeup. If not, they're going to be official in my campaign until the new rules come out. That said, I come to the real reason for writing you. Your review of Wars End. How can someone so good be so wrong? I won't cover it in detail, but here are a few of my observations, not in any specific order. Background - I have a group of six players who got into Torg a few years after it started, so we were never on the Infiniverse update or anything like that. But we loved the game, so we caught up in time to play Wars End in order. My players (and I) tend to get bored easily, so each player had at least a secondary and a tertiary character, some of them powerful enough to stand with the primary characters (especially the Nile old professer and the dark hero with super skill and test and fire combat of 28+, respectively). Just as a note, all but two are middle-aged (35-43), and the other two are teen agers. All have been playing RPGs for at least 15 years, including the teenagers (my son started when he was four.) When we played Wars End, a total of 22 characters hit the module, and eleven of them died. In spite of that, every single player walked out with a smile on their face, and agreement that it was by far the best Torg module, and probably the best module of any kind they had ever played. The reasons. 1. I found it a bit comical that in your review of Masterbook you complained of the lack of heroic feel, like Torg had. This is one of the best things about WE. It is something that most Torg modules strived for, and only a VERY few reached. 2. You complained of the heroes not having an impact on many of the 'teleport by Apeiros' scenes. We found this to be a little annoying, but the lack of major annoyance was driven by the fact that we had no intention of ending the campaign when this module was over. So they drug Malroux away. We liked Malroux, and of course he was healed. 3327 obviously had more clones than just those six, and of course they were safe on Marketplace. The warrior of the dark, who cares. One WotD looks just like the other. Although in that case, we had heroes with haste cards who easily beat Tolwyn to the WotD, and did the killing themselves. So all in all, no better or worse than any other 'meanwhile..' scene. 3. I will completely give you the 'Too much to do in one module' argument. I agree, and so did everyone else. I would much rather have seen an 'end of 3327' module, followed by an 'end of Malroux' module, and so on. But that's not the fault of either the author or the module, it lays squarely on WEG. 4. End of the first act - they didn't get to do anything dramatic. My son martyred his Russian Tech spy, and killed Mobius. And believe me, I tried to fudge things so that he could get away. Too much good card play and good character play simply didn't allow it. Wu Han is now High Lord of Earth, very appropriate since we have a Nile character who has had him as a campaign nemesis since the first Torg trilogy. 5. Randall Chapman. My take on this is that the sword he had naturally led him to the most powerful Storm Knights on Earth. I.E., the PCs. Did manage to catch a mage (secondary character) off by herself and behead her. If she'd have had an alertness card, he would have been toast, you know how unbalanced the magic system in Torg is, especially for someone with all the manipulation knowledges. But it did make the players realize this was not an ordinary adventure, and got them to be more careful. 6. 45 P-rated cyber priests. We only had two of the primary characters present at the time, and it still took two rounds. It only took that long because I wouldn't let the Dark Hero with the super-fire combat skill kill more than 12 per round. P-rated or not, it's hard to cancel 8-10 wounds. (Vital blow, multi-action,.boosted bullets, it was a joke). Only thing worse would have been if they were mostly ords. General comment about all the bitching about all the p-rated characters. This was Wars End! Of course most of them should have been p-rated. It's all about that heroic feel you were talking about. 7. I don't know what your group liked, but my players were in complete agreement, that Orrosh and LL were a waste of publishing space. They got to defeat the two High lords they wanted out the most, as well as their old enemy Mobius, and the final blow on the WotD. My players like Nile, CP, and Aysle, in that order. Tharkhold is also a big favorite. Akashans left - who cares. The bit about the bunch on the moon is just so you can still have some Akashan PCs, the only good thing about the realm. Ditto for Land Below. 8. Comment about the last act, when the resistance accepts them without question. Gee, I don't know why a group including a paladin, a mystery man, a nile giant (transformed from Aysle) and a kefee haroo wouldn't be mistaken for a group of Tharkhold gang-bangers, they look almost identical. As you said many times - sheesh. Especially considering that many of these PCs were to be considered famous, having done some of the key deeds in the whole campaign. 9. Destructo Don - It wouldn't have been nearly as much fun without him. The PCs insisted he accompany them, he died in the last act but one. They were sorry, but not too sorry. 10. Never really played much in New Orleans, not a big interest in my group. Face it, they didn't like Orrosh. Not because it was too deadly, that's why we had secondary and tertiary characters. Because it was a lame realm, and not nearly as scary as Tharkhold or CP. The monsters were scary because it was their JOB, for goodness sake. So the chance to kill a few nightmares was welcomed. Okay, the schoolgirls were stretching it, but that's the only problem we had with that act. 11. Repeated write ups. What you saw as a flaw, I saw as a good thing. My number one bitch about Torg modules is the tendency to say "3 cyber priests, CP page 113" or whatever. Gee, what good writing. NOT. Let's have six or seven books open, some of them in two or three places, to try and run one battle. As an author, I always considered that an example of a very lazy author. Given the scope of this module, this is NOT a bad thing. This is a very good thing. 12. scenes that don't do anything. I took the majority of those as card-shuffling scenes. Give the players a chance to retune their hands before the big stuff. Okay, the very first scene was a waste, but I found several others where I spoke out and gave credit to the author for doing that. To me, it showed a good understanding of the mechanics of the mechanics of the game. 13. Mercy killing of Baruk Kaah. About time. Face it, NOBODY liked the LL. I doubt that they ever sold a LL sourcebook after the first few years. At least everyone I know (whether they play Torg or not), has received a copy by going to a convention and getting it off the prize table. It was standard. You ask WEG for prizes for your con, they send you some P-chalice modules, and three boxes of LL sourcebooks. So let them screw over Kaah, it was a fitting end. 14. Four dramatic scenes in a row! What an outrage. One would almost think that this was supposed to be something really big, like the end of the war. Lighten up. I admit the second one pretty much got skipped, it was just a chance to re-fill - re-tune hands. 15. The Gaunt Man - This was a very tough battle, as it should have been. The Kefee martyred herself to provide a distraction for the tough guy, who managed to get a players call on intimidating the GM. This set up the final blow. (I don't remember the exact mechanics, but he did it fair and square). Oh, and his players call was entirely reasonable, that the Gaunt Man would concentrate on him, instead of the paladin who was just about to pick up the Sword. I didn't completely allow it, the GM did have his true death somewhere around, even if he couldn't see it, but it gave the paladin enough of an advantage to do the deed. 16. Comment on the conversion. You stated that DM's who had players with 75-100 possibilities were just giving away too many. So, your players never discovered the Eternity Shard hole in the game? I never gave out any more than what was specified in a module, never had more than two subplots (one reg, one campaign), active, and still had people finishing one act adventures with 30-40 possibilities coming. Sure, it's not a Glory DEED to tap the shard and get a 60+ on a piloting roll, but it does allow for a glory card to be played. In one of the longer adventures, I had a group with 19 glory rolls hanging by the end. That's not being too generous, that just players using the system to the max. If your players will allow you to disallow glory rolls, they are a lot more subdued than most Torg players I've ever seen. And remember, by the end, they have a lot of Shards (I think my group had 6 or 8 spread out over the 22 PCs.) I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I take partial credit, I did assume that I was to have them make Perseverence rolls when appropriate, and I have been a DM since 1981, so we have some very experienced players, but while it had a lot of flaws, the fun we had more than made up for it. I know this is years after you wrote the review, and I don't even expect you to acknowledge it, but I do have a question. Is there any way we can get on a playtest list, or even get info on what and when stuff is coming out. For an example, we decided it had been enough years since we played everything that we started the Torg campaign over again. Everyone has new PCs, and we're trying to go through things in order again. Yeah, a few times people remember stuff, but given a totally different party, there's rarely anything they can do about it. Also, I have good enough players to keep separate PC knowledge and players knowledge. Sorry about all the bitching, but given the high quality of everything else I've seen you do, I just had to comment on you missing one so completely. Write with rebuttal if you want to. Tom Prusa