Saturday, May 24, 2008

The Compleat Strategist, and Awesome Therein

I just went to the New York location of The Compleat Strategist.

It is awesome.

My local store is pretty good, but it mostly sticks to d20, White Wolf, and GURPS. It might have a smattering of other systems, but I haven't check in a while.

The Compleat Strategist, on the other hand . . .

Wow.

Shelves full of d20 books I'd never heard of, systems I'd only read about only, and others I'd never even fathomed. Most of it I probably could have gotten online, but I can't browse online. I'm not surrounded by books, can't pick them up and flip through them, can't walk out with a book I only heard about today.

They even had a copy of the Stargate SG-1 book--the one that's out of print, because Sony revoked the license. I very, very badly wanted to get it, but a $50 price tag and a drought of acquaintances who both like gaming and would care that they were playing Stargate stayed my hand.

Instead, I'm now the proud owner of Feng Shui.

A tough choice, between that and d6 Space, (or perhaps Adventure, haven't heard as much about it but it looked cool) and I would have considered Savage Worlds if they'd had it. Something about it being out of print. I dunno.

(Amusingly, none of these were on the list of systems I want. Ah, well.)

So far, I'm happy with Feng Shui. Prep on both sides of the screen is fast a simple, since it encourages everyone to lean on action movie cliches, so it may fill that "one-shot system" hole I've had in my game line-up for a while. I need to get a chance to run it (I've got at least one weekend free before 4e hits . . .) but it looks like it fits my natural style pretty well. Fast, loose, a fair amount of action, but not nothing but fights, and encouraging cool ideas from the players.

We'll see how it goes.

No comments:

Post a Comment