I'll get Arachnidia out of the way first - it's been published before and is one of those Land Below domed worlds that has different World Laws from the Land Below supplement but has the same axioms. I have no idea why it's here, Arachnidia plays absolutely no part in the module. I guess they needed something to fill the last five pages of the module and just grabbed whatever they could find from Infiniverse that hadn't been published in a supplement before.

    Actually that's not quite true - the few creature writeups that are provided are done in Masterbook instead of Torg format so maybe the purpose was to show how the conversions work. And there is a reference to a nonexistant Appendix C that would seem to tie Arachnidia and the Land Below into a post-Possibility Wars setting so maybe something was planned that would explain why Arachnidia was included but that got cut at the last minute.

    Going back to the first appendix, it is made up of three sections. The first is a short piece of fiction by John Terra that briefly describes a possible post-War setting. That is followed by a few other possible post-War scenarios and then by the Torg-Masterbook conversion notes.

    Terra's fiction piece basically depicts a world that is more or less returned to normal after the Possibility Wars and in the process of rebuilding itself. Some of this rebuilding appears to be accomplished with lightning speed since it takes place in a famous New York City restaurant (Tavern on the Green) only a few months after the end of the War.

    The piece mentions that nearly all non-Core Earthers have left the cosm via "the Nexus of reality", which I am assuming is the same Nexus of All Realities that Baruk Kaah fell into in the Land Below and was transformed into an amalgam of all the realities present on Core Earth. Whether or not the Nexus is supposed to still be in the Land Below or not is unclear, if it's the site of a mass exodus of people then one would assume it's actually accessible somewhere on Core Earth, but there's a reference to going "down there" which sounds like it's underground.

    To further compound the problem, who first figured out that the Nexus was an intercosmal airport and people could use it to go home? The only prior experience anyone has ever had with the Nexus was the group of Storm Knights that witnessed Kaah being disintegrated within it and then later coming back in his mixed-up GodKaah state. Not exactly the kind of thing that encourages people to jump in thinking it'll take them home! And if the Nexus is still in the Land Below that further compounds the difficulty of someone finding this out and making the information available to everyone else on the planet.

    Putting that aside for the moment we come to the part that had me confused. He asserts that because all the other realities are "gone" any and all signs of their presence go away as well. A character who was a cyberganger during the War shows another character that he's still got cyberware and she reacts like the idea of a P-Rated possessing a contradictory tool is something completely unheard of anymore.

    At first I thought that maybe we just weren't told that the ganger had his cyberware removed after the War so he wouldn't have to deal with it and his having cyberware again is what surprised the other character. But he then tells the other character that passing through the Nexus to another reality (Tharkold in his case) and coming back has let him "recharge" his reality for a few months at a time. That indicates to me that there's more to his having cyberware than it just being something new, it indicates that by normal Core Earth standards it's something he cannot have, period, except through this "recharge" business.

    There are a couple possible explanations I came up with to explain this situation but none are entirely satisfactory. The first is that after the War Core Earth is so drained of possibility energy that it is entirely a pure zone, so that even P-Rated characters would have to abandon contradictory tools. But if that is the case then this "recharging" business means the character comes back with a reality bubble that has a duration of several months, which is ridiculous. (It also assumes that the character's Reality is Tharkold instead of Core Earth, if he's a Core Earther it means that he's adopted Tharkold reality or something equally bizarre for a brief period of time.)

    Another is that the character's reality is Tharkold and that he was stuck on Core Earth in a state of disconnection without access to the tool that he disconnected with, which means that he would remain disconnected until he got back to Tharkold and could reconnect without the tool. So "recharging" could just be a euphemism for reconnecting but that wouldn't explain the bit about it lasting for a few months at a time. And maybe I read too much into it but it seems like he's telling the other character that she'll be recharged too if she goes through the Nexus, but she's a Core Earther (reporter Corey Jones, which people might recognize from Terra's other Torg fiction pieces as well as the Character Collection supplement) and can reconnect easily without going anywhere.

    So I'm not sure what the hell Terra was saying with this fiction piece other than "Earth goes back to normal" and "the Nexus can be used for cosm-hopping". Clearly he had something weird in mind for how reality works in the post-War setting but it's more confusing than intriguing.

    Okay, enough on that. There are three post-War scenarios presented after the fiction piece. All three of them reference the Nexus as if it's something we should expect (maybe I just missed a page where this is revealed to the world or something) as well as "the global reality storm" that occured at the end of the Possibility Wars. This must be also on that page I missed since there was no mention of it at the end of Act Four and the first mention of it in the appendix sounds like we're supposed to know all about it already.

    The first scenario is essentially the same as what Terra's fiction piece proposed, a world more or less back to normal rebuilding itself with the Nexus available for intercosm travel. But then they just had to ruin it by throwing in the Core Earth Darkness Device, even though in the past WEG denied that there was such a beast. Now all of a sudden there is one and everyone is looking for it.

    The second scenario is a post-apocalyptic setting, essentially the global reality storm scours the surface of the world and reduces everything to rubble. A few non-CE reality hardpoints exist in scattered locations but essentially it's a "Mad Max" setting under CE reality. Yeah, that's a nice way to finish off the Possibility Wars, win the battle but lose the war, stop the Gaunt Man but the Earth is destroyed anyway. Whee.

    The last proposed scenario is described as "possibly the most interesting and fully realized" one, which actually means that it was the one WEG planned on using for "Storm Lords", their planned (but now indefinitely-postponed) followup to Torg using the Masterbook system. It was given a very harsh reception when WEG tested it out on us a few years ago and I'm pretty sure that's why "Storm Lords" was shelved, if the majority of Torg fans won't buy a followup to Torg then who would?

    Basically it's an alternate version of the second scenario, but it's not the surface of the Earth that's reduced to rubble, it's Earth's reality. Some of the invader's stelae zones are "burned" into Core Earth reality and exist even without stelae. Areas that aren't "burned in" (ie, everything that used to be Core Earth) are subject to savage reality storms that randomly change the reality of areas for unknown periods of time. Essentially the goal for Storm Knights is to play at being High Lords (ie, Storm Lords) and establish their own reality zones (using eternity shards instead of stelae - are there really going to be that many eternity shards in the cosm?) Oh, and the CE DD from the first scenario is thrown in as well. Gates to pocket dimensions and other cosms also abound, as if randomly changing realities weren't enough variety. On the plus side there's no mention of the outrageous reality-based abilties WEG was thinking of in the original Storm Lords proposal (like being able to transform objects or alter local axiom levels with a reality skill check.)

    Personally I prefer the first scenario type, though without Terra's confusing ideas on how reality will work in the setting. As I indicated a few paragraphs above I really do not care for the "we won but the world is destroyed anyway" settings, I just don't see that as an appropriate way to conclude a heroic, cinematic campaign like the Possibility Wars. If the characters win and save the Earth then they've saved the Earth, none of this "sorry, everything you fought for gets vaporized anyway" crap.

    That leaves us with the Torg-Masterbook conversion notes. As you might expect, there isn't much to it since MB was built off of the same core concepts as Torg. However, there are several differences that I felt should be addressed when making a conversion system but weren't.

    For example, there are many skills in Masterbook that are under different attributes than where they were under in Torg. This could change a character's abilties quite a bit. For example, consider a magician who in Torg has a Perception of 12 and +4 adds in alteration magic for a skill value of 16. Let's say his spellbook is full of spells that have Difficulty Numbers ranging from 13 to 19. With his skill value this makes some of them easy and some of them difficult but not impossible.

    Now we convert him to Masterbook. Perception goes to Intellect, no problem there. But alteration magic is not an Intellect skill, it's a Confidence skill (Spirit in Torg.) Oh oh, our mage's Spirit is only 8. With those +4 skill adds he has a skill value of only 12, all of his spells have now become much more difficult to cast (and with Masterbook's 2d10 instead of 1d20 that reduces his odds of successfully casting them even more.)

    Another problem with skills can be found in the combat skills. Under Torg you used melee weapons or unarmed combat for both attack and defense values. Masterbook doesn't, you need the seperate skills of melee parry or unarmed parry. This is not noted anywhere in the conversion notes, though it should become obvious the first time anyone tries to run a fight with the converted characters ("What do you mean my character with +10 adds of unarmed combat doesn't know anything about defending himself from attack?")

    They also do not address the differences in skill specialization; in Torg if you specialized in a skill you got a +1 bonus and that was it. In Masterbook you buy each specialization as a seperate skill and then add it to the base skill (so fire combat +3 and pistols +3 gives you a pistols skill of +6). This should have at least been mentioned in some way, like having Torg specializations translate to one add of the appropriate MB specialization.

    Then there's the matter of scaling. In Torg your Tag Skill was basically your professional skill, it's what you supposedly did for a living or something along those lines. Therefore I always assumed that meant that three adds represented a fair level of competency and/or education in a skill area. In Masterbook +3adds is considered "barely adequate", competent doesn't come until at least +6 adds and you're not an expert until you have something like +15 adds.

    On the flip side though, since attributes are translated directly from Torg to Masterbook (with Torg's Dexterity being translated to both Agility and Dexterity) the characters are going to be far beyond the normal Masterbook character in that regard (Masterbook characters get 68 attribute points for their eight attributes, Torg translations will essentially get 66 plus the value of their Dexterity, or anywhere from 74 (DEX 8) to 79 (DEX 13)).

    One Torg mechanic completely ignored by the conversion notes is disconnection. Obviously characters won't disconnect on a roll of '1' anymore since that's an impossible result with 2d10! So what do they disconnect on? The obvious choice would be a roll of 2 (double 1's) but what then about four-case contradictions? Any total of four or less? Something that more closely approximates a 20% chance? Would it have been asking too much for WEG to do this little bit of math for all the mathematically challenged gamers?

    Other than character conversions the only rules addressed are the dice (1d20 vs 2d10), card play (MB is a little different) and the Life Points cap (in Masterbook you can never have more than 10 Life Points.) Basically they say use whichever set of rules you prefer and leave it at that, though they recommend using the Life Points Cap because they apparently received a lot of complaints from Torg GMs about characters who have "75-100 Possibilities and are impossible to stop." Geez, I think the worst anyone ever got in my game was 40-50 and that's because he'd been saving up to raise an attribute. I wonder if they ever stopped to consider if these complaining GMs were handing out too many Possiblities at the end of adventures?

    Well, I suppose that's enough griping, most of my problems are actually with Masterbook and not these two pages of conversion notes. So that's it, the end of the review. Go back and read something else now to get the bad taste out of your mouth.  Or check out this rebuttal to my review by someone who liked War's End.