Game: Crooks!
Publisher: Green Ronin
Series: Mutants and Masterminds: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 20th, October 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 9/10 [ Something special ]
Total Score: 10
Average Score: 5.00
No. I’m not here to gush about Crooks! Nevertheless, I am here to tell you that it’s a wonderful book.
Green Ronin‘s Mutants and Masterminds has been the best game to date to say “So long and thanks for all the fish” to the d20 logo. The colourful, slick and professional superheroes d20 based RPG is simply excellent. This tradition of superiority continues for Crooks!
It’s a thin book for a hardback but the page count of 128 is not to be sniffed at. Those are 128 pages of glossy colour and atmospheric artwork. The result is a book you like to hold. It’s almost like an illustrators portfolio; you can just pick it up, flick through the pages and soak up the inspiration.
There’s a strong tradition of NPC books in the super hero RPG genre. Fantasy games have manuals of many monsters and the hero game equivalent is to dedicate plenty of page space to intricately back storied villains. Every key villain in the book has a double page spread to his or her (or its) self. There are four columns of text and a double column with of illustration in most cases. It works very well.
You’re not getting any experience points for deducing that Crooks! is a supplement filled with super villains. You’ll not even get any experience points from this reviewer-GM for guessing that there are plenty of non-super powered and low powered crooks to round out the book either. The Mutants & Masterminds goblins are excellent, a catch all term from the multi-dimensional creatures that escaped through the Trollgate that Kalak the Mystic opened it in 1942. Kalak the Mystic appears later on in the book. There are aliens, demons, super spies, ninja, robots, security agents, military forces and more here in the mini-crook section. They’re not just tossed in randomly; they’re bound into the possible plot thread that runs through Crooks!
This plot line that binds the villains and enemies loosely together is a good idea. It’s not such an ineffectual plot line that GMs might as well abandon it and start from scratch rather than attempt to flesh it out and transform it something interesting. This thread of story isn’t so dominant that a GM couldn’t just ignore it entirely. It’s the best of both words. If you want a handy continuity (so often the Holy Grail of a decent comic book series) to keep your villains appropriately intertwined then this lightweight plot is ideal for you. It’s also perfect excuse to lavish the reader with a 10 page comic introduction to the book. Or, if you want, you can pick and mix the villains.
Our villains cover a wide range of power levels. The Atomic Brain and Kalak the Mystic are each PL 20, the Czar and the Iron Crossed (nicely balanced in ideology) are the next most powerful at PL 17. The weakest of the named crooks are Pixie and Wallflower at PL 7 (they’re part of a gang, though). That’s a good range of Power Levels. Add in the not so powerful villain and some animals (sharks, gorillas, etc) and the range runs the full gambit from 1 to 21. Yes, 21. I was being deliberately misleading when I listed enemies like demons after noting that the book includes stats for low powered villains. Demons? Low powered. I think not. This is good news for Mutants & Mastermind groups who are playing with a Justice League power level. At the back of the book there’s a handy power level index of villains. That’s just the sort of thing I want from a book like this.
There are more than just villains of different shapes and sizes in Crooks! There are new rules, these include, new feats (the game doesn’t quite escape the d20 trend of adding new feats whenever possible), new devices, plenty of new powers and weaknesses. The super hero genre allows and even encourages new villains (or allies) to enter the plot flow with previously unknown (or impossible) powers and abilities.
I think the book’s quick villain templates and GM tips and advice on campaign style and control are best seen bonus material. I like the book too much to cynically dismiss these sections as filler. I think these short chapters are too good to be dismissed as filler.
There’s a catch, I fear. Crooks! is very good but it is just a book of villains. If you’ve no intention at all of using any pre-written villains then you’re just left to simple enjoy the professional gloss of Crooks, the comic, the new rules, powers and feats… Despite all of those, if you’re still certain that you’ll never use a villain from a supplement then Crooks is a luxury. I think it’s a luxury worth having though. Oh. Yeah. And if you actually interested in some ready to go villains then you can’t possibly go wrong with this supplement. It seems that sometimes crime does actually pay.
