Arsenal

Game: Arsenal
Publisher: Perpetrated Press
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 9th, November 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10   [ Really good ]
Total Score: 8
Average Score: 8.00

Arsenal is a strange book. Despite the previews from Perpetrated Press I wasn’t sure what to expect from the book but I had a hunch it would be something different.

We’ve had books filled with monsters, books filled with spells and even prestige classes but books dedicated to weapons and armour are somewhat rarer.

Arsenal is more different still, the weapons and armour inside aren’t the bread and butter of sword and sorcery, they’re technomagic weapons and armour; a peculiar mix of mithral and Kevlar or machine-guns and fireballs for example.

The softback book is 128-pages long and comes in at just under $20. The text size is larger than customary for d20 products, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it does mean fewer words per dollar.

The book is full of tables, at times you can just let the pages flick by and see nothing but rows of white and grey. This doesn’t go over the top though; it’s pretty much what you would expect when you have a shopping list of holy grenades to pick from. Careful layout and design stop all these tables turning the book into a square mess.

There’s just a simple border image in Arsenal, a curving line that extends over the top of the page as well and this softens up the square blocks of stats. I enjoyed the artwork too. At times the illustrations slide into a comic strip style and there’s even lettering on some of the strips. Actually, the illustrations really do help make the book.

There are many gamers out there who like the pose factor of blasting away with twin pistols, lining up a shot with a sexy sniper rife or just sauntering around with a holster on and the artwork captures and capitalises on this. Consistently the illustration style would remind me of something other than the traditional fantasy games inspired by D&D.

I was reminded sometimes of Palladium’s Rifts line, sometimes anime (especially the front and back covers) and the full page drawing on page 28 had me thinking Cthulhu for some reason. All this together means that there’s already a distinctive Perpetrated Press illustration style – or there will be if the company produces further books and they adopt the same approach.

Arsenal isn’t a book dedicated to technomagic weapons. There’s a lot more in it. There are prestige classes, skills and pages of feats and spells. There are even some game intelligent discussions too; important observations such as the modifications required to adjust Challenge Ratings when guns are involved.

“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology” – that’s the quote from the back of the book, a rather cheeky take on the famous comment from Arthur C Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. It makes the point though.

Why try and keep them apart in fantasy or even science-fantasy games? The book’s introduction starts this debate going, asking questions like “Why devise robots or droids when you already have golems?”

It moves swiftly into looking at different campaign settings in which you might want to use technomagic weapons. Better than that, the text doesn’t try and sell you the idea like some sleazy used car salesman it actually debates the pros and cons intelligently, offering advice and inspiration equally.

Arsenal lets you know when and why they’ve tinkered with things. The prices for these weapons are much lower than they would be if you followed the item creation guidelines in the core rules and their reasons for changing that are, by their own admission, somewhat fuzzy – but at least they’re there for you to agree with or remove as required.

Rules for changing the Challenge Ratings are also given; after all, a minotaur isn’t as much of a challenge for a 1st level Bard with a bazooka as it is for a 1st level Bard with a slingshot. Then again, what if the minotaur was packing a machine-gun? The rules also include how much weaponry you can safely assign to creatures (like orcs, say) without screwing up their basic Challenge Rating in the first place.

Honestly, it makes me wish Wizards had trusted the average gamer to have as much intelligence and to have published the Monster Manual with unblemished Challenge Ratings and then a formula on how to adjust them appropriately if your party of characters are packing +X magic weapons, rather than the combined and hard to retro-engineer mess that’s there instead.

Some core classes are better suited to technomagic weapons than others. Who cares if your barbarian can go into a rage – it doesn’t help him against my bazooka, your mage can cast fireballs – that’s nice, I have grenades. The discussion also expands into possible problems in miss-matching character classes with campaign settings better suited to hi-tech and mage-tech weapons. What’s a Druid doing onboard a spaceship?

You won’t even notice when you turn the page into the chapter on skills. Really. You won’t notice. Arsenal might have large font but it doesn’t waste space with trivial details like new pages especially to announce the presence of a new chapter.

If the content doesn’t give it away then the title in the border bar at the top of the page keeps you safe. Of course, skill chapters are just skill chapters and they struggle to impress. This one qualifies as well written, invokes the gods of common sense and provide some useful summary charts. It’s not a waste of space.

The feats are essential for the book. It’s not often that happens. This time around, though, without feats like “Craft Technomagic Firearms” it’ll be a heck lot more tricky to integrate the new weaponry and armour in Arsenal into your game.

On the other hand, a lot of the new feats begin with dreadful “Improved” word.

The new spells, of which there are about 25, are all technomagic in nature. This is great. If there were more of these spells then it would be worth buying the book for spells alone – it’s a certainly a niche that’s underplayed in the d20 industry.

You could swap most of these spells straight into Cthulhu for example. The prestige classes are in a similar vein but not quite as good; they’re there to fill that technological gap but there are hardly any of them.

Before the looong list of weapons, explosives and armour begin there’s a small section on combat. Perpetrated Press scores points again here by crediting you with a bit of intelligence, by explaining what’s going on and letting you pick what suits your tastes.

AC is a good example if you’re one the people who feel the abstraction of armour into a to-hit role isn’t suitable for hi-tech weapons then they offer up a way to change things around (with minimal fuss) so that AC reduces damage instead. Huzzah. Well done.

And then all the weapons begin. We’re at about page 40 at this point. That’s nearly 100 pages left for all the technomagic stuff. The weapons and armour here are interesting. Technomagic means you can do interesting things like throw tentacle grenades at people – and watch as the tentacles burst forth from nowhere and entangle your target.

You also have holy weapons that blast globes of sunlight at people. It’s quirky though. There’s no way I can sit down and read through the lists of weapons, although the hefty dose of illustrations for the quirky weapons do help. I’m not a gear-head, big guns just aren’t the reason why I’ll play a sci-fi game but there’s something different about Arsenal that makes the read more appealing.

Arsenal does strike me a strange book. I stand by that but it’s strange in a warm and friendly way (er, discounting those tentacle grenades which don’t look friendly at all).

Arsenal succeeds in being more than just a book full of strange weapons, it’s more intelligent than that premise suggests and the related rules found in the book will be helpful in a wide range of games. Arsenal succeeds in being just another d20 offering, it’s pretty good.