Second Game Of Christmas 2018

Previous Games of Christmas: Earthdawn

Sometimes to fight great evil, one must turn to another type of evil. When heroes fall, and systems collapse, sometimes all you have left is the lesser evil. That is the idea behind today's game. Supervillains save the day. I kind of fall in love with ideas, and from the moment I encountered this one, I was infatuated with the idea of this game.

Necessary Evil

Story time. Back in 2003...or maybe 2004, not sure...I was at a gaming convention(MACE if it matters). Anyway, I was signing up for games and I saw this one listed as Savage Worlds. I had never heard of it before, but the setting was Star Wars, and I thought it sounded fun. The GM was Clint Black and he kept going on about all the cool settings and the like. And he held up his copy of Necessary Evil and said it was brand new. Ho man was it fun. I ended up getting a copy at the con and getting it signed. A lot of very important things happened for me at that convention. This game is fun to play and solidly designed. I will be using the Explorers Edition throughout this, as in most respects it is an improvement on the original edition.

Peritextual Elements

Pictured 1st Edition, much the best

The book is solidly built and holds up well. the cover is OK, though I really prefer the original cover to the new one. Inside it is all high gloss pages with lots of solid art. Funny story, at the time I first played the game I was also playing City of Heroes and there is a character in the game that is almost an exact match to my character in the game. It was part of what sold the game tome. It is a solid visual design through some of the art and layout is less than perfect. Overall though I find it fun to look through even if I am not playing.

Mechanics

The game uses Savage Worlds as its engine. you have a number of attributes and skills, they use die steps, much like yesterday's game. you also have levels and you gain edges as you go forward. Edges are limited by level and die step...except if you take the super edge superpower which lets you take any edge. You can start off super powerful in this game. the game is kind of unique in that it is pretty simple and yet has a lot of fiddly bits and subsystems. That seems contradictory...and it is, but somehow it manages to be both complex and simple. I like it. The game also has an interesting adventure building mechanic, where it randomizes the type of adventure while still getting a slid campaign thru line. In the first edition, it was far worse than this, explorers edition has a much better-designed adventure path system.

Setting

Second edition, which I like less

The setting is a pretty standard supers universe in its history. up until the alien invasion. Aliens invaded and the heroes fought back. It was a tough fight and they only won through the help of a friendly group of aliens. After the victory everyone celebrated, and all was great...for about ten minutes. You see the friendly aliens were secretly behind the invasion, to begin with,
and they used the victory as a way to wipe out the heroes and conquer earth once and for all. So the heroes are all dead. However, this worlds top mastermind realized a plan to gather villains and use them to defeat the aliens, both groups of aliens. Anyway, you play as the villainous members of the resistance fighting against evil fishy overlords from space. There is a lot more t the setting than that, but that is the basics and I love the concept too much to spoil it for you.

And that is all for today folks. I hope you enjoyed it.
Next time...

Dogs in the Vinyard