Game: Fang & Fury
Publisher: Green Ronin
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 26th, July 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 8
Average Score: 8.00
The Races of Renown series from Green Ronin presents Fang & Fury as their Vampire race book offering.
If the 80-paged book seems slim when it’s on the shelf then pick it up and flick through the pages. The text size is small and the density good. Green Ronin really are giving you value for money on the word-per-cent count. Fang & Fury is marked at US $16.95. The only place where the text size is different is at the very back of the book for the appendixes where it is smaller still.
The artwork is excellent. The opportunity to draw sexy vampire babes was not missed. Its pretty book in strictly layout terms too. The shade boarded tables for facts and figures work especially well. There’s no index page, the appendixes carry on to the back inside cover, but the contents page is right at the front and will put you to the right chapter at least.
It’s a book about vampires. Dungeons and Dragons vampires at that. Fang & Fury tries to put forward rules for every possible vampire myth, strength and weakness that you can think of. It does this while wrapping the bundle in a typical D&D mythos. Vampires have a connection to the Negative Plane but it’s not as strong as it might be, the effects of the positive energy, of life, create the burning desire to feed. Rather ironic that. Where possible the D&D cosmology is used to explain the science behind the myths. Vampires repelled by church bells react in the way they do because of vibrations they carry from the Positive Energy Plane.
Author and BioWare designer, Jim Bishop, knows his stuff and shares a point of view with me (notice how I slyly link the two!). The standard rules for vampires aren’t much fun. Either the player party is equipped to deal with the vampire menace and do so with relative ease or they’re caught by surprise and are lucky if they’re not completely slaughtered. Neither scenario is particularly entertaining. The standard vampire is also way too powerful to be used as PC race unless you’re willing to do an entire vampire campaign. The answer to both is a new type of vampire, the Vampire Scion, the Scion for common use. These are the vampires talked about by the book and they’re the ones who’ll shudder at church bells, gain resist fire by drinking from a fire dragon (the subtype) or die if fully immersed in running water.
The Vampire Scion is introduced as a fully-fledged race with strong player character potential. Fang & Fury runs through possible alignment combinations and discusses the likely vampire match; the Lawful Neutral scion (“Punisher”) believe they must only feed on those who violate universal or social law. On the other end of the scale, the Chaotic Evil (“Beast”) Scions are some of the most destructive creatures known. There’s an inherent problem for young would-be adventuring Scions since they’re unlikely to risk straying too far from their graves but the class still represents the best solution for a GM wanting to include a vampire PC in a mixed party. The same chapter goes on to look at a few class rules for the Scion. A paladin who is turned into a Scion will awaken as a fallen paladin. The Scion is, of course, a template race, and the book gives this to us.
Then, in Chapter Two, we look at core classes and the Scion. Huh? Again? The first chapter looks at a few of the core classes and points out special rules that apply if that class ends up turning in a Scion. The second chapter runs through all the core classes and npc classes and talks about how they might be played as a Scion, it repeats the special class rules again. It’s only a small overlap and it allows both chapters to be complete.
Ever since the great Hammer & Helm in the Races of Renown did so well in presenting alternative racial concepts I’ve expected the series to continue doing so. Fang & Fury does pretty well on this respect, perhaps it’s the vampire’s blood that’s undead and the PC can enjoy roleplaying one personality and the invading blood entity. Why must vampires be undead? Consider the Natural Hunter. In this instance a vampire wouldn’t be a template and so we’re given a full stat entry for a typical Natural Vampire. If vampires are driven by negative energy alone then they’d be psychic vampires and might have a different set of powers; sense living, for example. The book briefly considers some vampire campaign options and isn’t too prim and proper not to push forward the Slayer option.
New feats. Always new feats. Fang & Fury finds an out of the box success here in the ancient medicine of humours. Science once believed that the balance of four body liquids called humours determined health and personality. The book explains this in better detail. It’s something that many gamers will already know and I have fond memories of roleplaying this horribly wrong medicine in favour of what we know now. I like the feats that play off the humours here. Vampires can target and drain the different humours. “Drain Yellow Bile” is a feat. It’s going to seriously exhaust the victim. It’s an impressive feat. It’s great. There are several new pages of feat so if you’re not has caught up as me with the morbid pseudo-science then there’s still probably something for you.
There are plenty of prestige classes in the book. There are 18 pages of them, that’s nearly a quarter of the book. The Black Abbot is a career move for an evil cleric. The Foundling is a rather tragically abducted elf maiden turned vampire by the Unseelie Queen. The Masqued Player is a mad actor-cum-undead. The Nighthawk falls short of being a hopping Chinese styled vampire and perhaps can be described as a high-flying swashbuckling vampire instead. The Rag Man is an alternative origin prestige class and a suicide returned to life as a shambling vampire. The Regent is a vampire leader of men. The Reveler is a vampire who’s stolen strength by attacking and draining other vampires. The Scourge is the brave, or foolish, vampire who takes the fight too the Paladins and forces of light. The Vampire Mage is entirely without magic – no, only kidding – the Vampire Mage is a mage who’s found a way to study the arcane arts for longer.
There’s a bunch of new creatures – some with a vampire connection. The Unseelie are present in the book. There is mention of the Unseelie Queen creating vampires in the Foundling prestige class and then as a dark deity at the back of the book and so perhaps that justifies their inclusion here. There are also vampiric dragons. I know it’s a fantasy game but this is a bit of a stretch for me. Do the other dragons manage to eat their food without swallowing the blood? Perhaps the other dragons exist only off the fleshy parts of the cows, horses and foolish adventurers that they eat and don’t benefit from the blood at all. Perhaps vampire dragons have giant mouths but very small teeth that allow them to suck the blood from the neck of their prey. Hurm.
The book concludes by the numbers. There are new gods, nicely written up and illustrated with an icon. There’s a bizarre maths god called MHKH and although I freely admit that maths is evil, I think this must be an in-joke that I don’t get. There are pages of new spells. Overlapping the two are new Cleric domains. There’s new equipment, the sort of stuff that’ll interest either vampires or vampire slayers.
Many of the crunchy parts of the book are succinctly summarised in small text appendixes. In fact, Fangs & Fury is fairly crunchy. The vampire scions, the book’s innovation, are there to address a mechanics issue. It is a mechanics issue that once ironed out should open the game up to better and more entertaining roleplaying though. Although the book does have this crunchy overtone many of the new mechanics do support roleplaying opportunities because they’re there to let you exploit your favourite vampire shtick.
Chalk up another success for Races of Renown.
